On August 17th, both the light and the gravitational wave signals from inspiraling-and-merging neutron stars reached Earth, where both were detected, for the first time, by humans. The inspiral phase ...

Apart from flashbacks that the hit Netflix series Breaking Bad may have conjured up, most of us have likely happily forgotten what we learned in chemistry classes back in school. So here’s a quick ...

Artist depiction of a Neutron Star. Photo Courtesy of NASA. In astronomy, most celestial objects are fairly large in size, and if they are small, they don’t usually present much interest (generally, ...

Nuclear puzzle: In the nucleus, neutrons can be stable, but free neutrons decay after a short period. Exactly how short is in dispute because experiments on neutrons stored in bottles and neutrons in ...

Neutrons are among the basic building blocks of matter. As long as they are part of a stable atomic nucleus, they can stay there for arbitrary periods of time. However, the situation is different for ...

Like a dried-up lemon from the back of the fridge, neutron stars are less squeezable than expected, physicists report. New measurements of the most massive known neutron star find that it has a ...

Testing basic principles of particle physics does not necessarily require a high-energy accelerator. As Peter Geltenbort explains, a growing community of neutron scientists is probing similarly ...

When a massive star dies in a supernova, the explosion is only the beginning of the end. Most of the stellar matter is thrown far and wide, but the star’s iron-filled heart remains behind. This core ...

The Madison, Wisconsin-based startup Phoenix has scouted a team of nuclear elites for a new frontier: small reactors that can revolutionize medical imaging, munitions scanning, and even ...