There's been a lot of attention on loneliness lately.

16% of Americans report feeling lonely all or most of the time.

The former Surgeon General even declared a loneliness epidemic.

On It's Been a Minute, we're launching a new series called All the Lonely People, diving deep

into how loneliness shows up in our lives and how our culture shapes it.

That's on the It's Been a Minute podcast on NPR.

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Jocelyn Bell-Bernel knows that in space, just as in life, nothing lasts forever.

Bigger stars at the end of their life explode dramatically.

They hugely brighten up.

They kick out a whole lot of gas and stuff into space.

And the core gets kicked against, gets compressed, get shrunk right down.

Massive stars more than 20 times bigger than our sun

eventually collapse into black holes,

infinitely small points of immense mass that we can't directly see.

Then, there are smaller stars still bigger than our sun

that don't fully collapse into black holes.

They're known as neutron stars because they're largely composed of one of the fundamental

particles that we call neutrons. Those neutrons? They were created when the pressure from the

explosion compressed the protons and electrons so tightly together they combined. And so the core of the star becomes a ball that's about 10 miles across, typically,

and spinning very rapidly.

A bit like the ice skater pulling her arms in, spins faster.

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