We are currently in orbit around the neutron star.

The star itself is large for its kind, roughly twice the mass of the sun.

However, all that mass is compressed into a volume no wider than 20 kilometers across.

That's about 12 miles.

That's two sun's worth of material crammed into an area roughly the size of the island of Manhattan.

Our orbit here is fast.

Achieving speeds of 25% the speed of light is easy, considering the

incredible gravitational strengths of the neutron star. In some rare cases, the gravity around a neutron star

is so intense that it can bend light in the path of a circle. That's right, light can orbit a neutron star.

In fact, when we look at the star, it appears larger than life.

Light from the opposite side curves around to reach us,

inflating its dimensions beyond all reasonable proportions.

The temperatures and radiation here are,

in a word, intense. The surface temperature of the star is around 1 million Kelvin,

comparable to the core temperatures of a hydrogen-burning star like the sun. However, neutron stars

do not generate their own heat. What we see is the

leftover heat from their formation, a process of violence unleashed when a giant star, at least eight

times the mass of the sun, reached temperatures and pressures in its core to fuse iron. But it could not

release energy from the fusion of iron, and so it collapsed. And in that process of collapse,

it literally shoved electrons into protons, turning them into neutrons and creating the neutron star.

So initially, neutron stars have a temperature of well over 10 million Kelvin.

But within less than a million years, there are only a tenth of that temperature.

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