Hot fluids of neutrons that flow without friction, superconductors made of protons, and a solid crust built of exotic atoms—features like these make neutron stars some of the strangest objects we've found in the cosmos so far. They pack all the mass of a star into a sphere the size of a city, resulting in states of matter we just don't have on Earth.
And yet, despite their extreme weirdness, neutron stars contain a mishmash of vaguely familiar features, as if seen darkly through a funhouse mirror. One of the weirdest is the fact that deep inside a neutron star you can find a whole menu full of (nuclear) pasta.
The forces and densities couldn't be more different, yet the shapes that emerge are amazingly similar.
The pasta is made of protons and neutrons, held together by the extreme pressures. These oddball nuclei arrange themselves into weird configurations that Matt Caplan of the University of Indiana and his colleagues call "nuclear pasta."1 The pasta layer lies in the inner crust, a transitional zone between a neutron star's outer crust and core. In the top of this layer, the nuclei form blobs called "gnocchi." Deeper down, they join…
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