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The constant bombardment creates hot spots at the magnetic poles. In fact, neutron stars are the strongest magnets in the universe! The magnetic fields can rip particles off the star’s surface and then smack them down on another part of the star. They can spin faster than blender blades, and they have powerful magnetic fields. These objects have a lot of cool physics going on. Just one teaspoon of neutron star matter would weigh as much as Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth! Neutron stars pack more mass than the Sun into a sphere about as wide as New York City’s Manhattan Island is long. Lighter ones (between about eight and 25 times the Sun’s mass) leave behind neutron stars. Heavier stars (around 25 times the Sun’s mass or more) leave behind black holes. What’s left behind depends on the star’s initial mass.
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When a star many times the mass of our Sun runs out of fuel, it collapses under its own weight and then bursts into a supernova. NICER was designed to study and measure the sizes and masses of neutron stars to help us learn more about what might be going on in their mysterious cores. Our Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, is an X-ray telescope perched on the International Space Station. So we turn to something we can study – the incredibly dense matter inside a neutron star, the leftover of an exploded massive star that wasn’t quite big enough to turn into a black hole. But there’s still a lot we don’t understand about it! For example: How does matter work when it’s about to become a black hole? We can’t learn anything about matter after it becomes a black hole, because it’s hidden behind the event horizon, the point of no return. Matter makes up all the stuff we can see in the universe, from pencils to people to planets.