A Neutron Star Packs More Than a Sun Into a City

Cambridge, 1967. A pen on a paper chart jumps about every 1.337 seconds, and for a while the half-serious nickname for whatever is sending it is little green men. What keeps time like that, holds more than a Sun inside the width of a city, and may have something to do with the gold on your hand? Subtitles in 8 languages (turn on CC). Chapters 0:00 An odd mark on paper 0:47 A star comes apart 2:10 A star in a city-sized space 3:28 The rhythm explained 5:03 A flare leaves its mark on Earth 6:17 Two stars and a ring 8:40 A question mark on the balance Sources Little Green Men, White Dwarfs or Pulsars? (Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Cosmic Search) – https://www.gb.nrao.edu/epo/PSC/burnell.htm PulsarWeek: The women who study pulsars (NASA Blueshift, 2017) – https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.... Core-collapse supernovae (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics) – https://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/84411/Core... Crab Nebula (NASA Hubble) – https://science.nasa.gov/asset/hubble/crab... NASA's Hubble Revisits Crab Nebula to Track 25 Years of Expansion (NASA, 2026) – https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/n... NASA's NICER Probes the Squeezability of Neutron Stars (NASA) – https://www.nasa.gov/universe/nasas-nicer-... A Radio Pulsar Spinning at 716 Hz (Hessels et al., Science 2006) – https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0601337 NASA's NICER Telescope Sees Hot Spots Merge on a Magnetar (NASA) – https://www.nasa.gov/universe/nasas-nicer-... NASA Missions Unmask Magnetar Eruptions in Nearby Galaxies (NASA) – https://www.nasa.gov/universe/nasa-mission... A downward revision to the distance of the 1806-20 cluster and associated magnetar (Bibby et al., 2008) – https://arxiv.org/abs/0802.0815 The 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics: press release (NobelPrize.org) – https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/... Gravitational waves and gamma-rays from a binary neutron star merger: GW170817 and GRB 170817A (LIGO) – https://ligo.org/science-summaries/GW17081... First Identification of a Heavy Element Born from Neutron Star Collision (ESO, 2019) – https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1917/ Where Does Gold Come From? NASA Data Has Clues (NASA, 2025) – https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/ne... The curious case of GW190814: a black hole and a mystery compact object (LIGO) – https://ligo.org/science-summaries/GW190814/ #NeutronStars #Astronomy #Space