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Astronomers Find Star-Within-a-Star, 40 Years After First Theorized
derekmead writes: After 40 years, astronomers have likely found a rather strange celestial body known as a Thorne–Zytkow object (TZO), in which a neutron star is absorbed by a red supergiant. Originally predicted in the 1970s, the first non-theoretical TZO was found earlier this year, based on calculations presented in a paper forthcoming in MNRAS.
TZOs were predicted by astronomer Kip Thorne and Anna Zytkow, who wasthen postdoctoral fellow at CalTech. The pair imagined what might happen if a neutron star in a binary system merged with its partner red supergiant. This wouldn't be like two average stars merging. Neutron stars are the ancient remnants of stars that grew too big and exploded. Their cores remain small — about 12.5 miles across — as they shed material out into space. Red supergiants are the largest stars in the galaxy, with radii up to 800 times that of our sun, but they aren't dense.
TZOs were predicted by astronomer Kip Thorne and Anna Zytkow, who wasthen postdoctoral fellow at CalTech. The pair imagined what might happen if a neutron star in a binary system merged with its partner red supergiant. This wouldn't be like two average stars merging. Neutron stars are the ancient remnants of stars that grew too big and exploded. Their cores remain small — about 12.5 miles across — as they shed material out into space. Red supergiants are the largest stars in the galaxy, with radii up to 800 times that of our sun, but they aren't dense.
One is a neutron Star. So a object multiple times more dense than the Sun but only a 5-15 miles wide. The other a red giant (when our Sun becomes a red giant it'll be as big as Earth's orbit). So the first barrier you would cross working for the middle is a iron polymer a million times stronger than steel as you crossed out of the tiny tiny neutron star into the absolutely enormous red giant. An analogy would be a BB gun pellet inside of a balloon.
^^^ That's a place where "average" can be quite deceiving. The sun's atmosphere is rarefied but its core's density is up to 150 g/cm3, or 150x that of water.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem