Astronomers find the most massive neutron star to date: study

Astronomers at the University of West Virginia in the United States discovered the most massive neutron star to date, which accumulates 2.17 times the mass of the sun in a sphere of only 20 to 30 kilometers.

This measurement is close to the limits of how massive and compact a single object can become without crushing in a black hole, according to the study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The neutron star is a dense and rapidly spinning celestial object that consists mainly of neutrons very close together and that results from the collapse of a much larger star body. A single sugar cube of neutron star material would weigh 100 million tons on Earth.

Researchers at the University of West Virginia discovered the star, approximately 4,600 light years from Earth, through the Green Bank Telescope in the United States.

The gravity of a white dwarf companion star deforms the surrounding space, according to Einstein's general theory of relativity. This makes the pulses of the pulsar travel a little more as they travel through distorted spacetime around the white dwarf. The delay reveals the mass of the white dwarf, which in turn provides a measurement of the neutron star's mass.