Why black holes spin at nearly the speed of light - by StartsWithABang
Whenever you take a look out there at the vast abyss of the deep Universe, it’s the points of light that stand out the most: stars and galaxies. While the majority of the light that you’ll first notice does indeed come from stars, a deeper look, going far beyond the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, shows that there’s much more out there.
The outer layers will create a sight known as a planetary nebula, which comes from the blown-off gases getting ionized and illuminated from the contracting central core. This nebula will glow for tens of thousands of years before cooling off and becoming neutral again, generally returning that material to the interstellar medium. When the opportunity then arises, those processed atoms will participate in future generations of star formation.
Astronomers now know enough about stars and stellar evolution to describe what happens during this process. For a star like our Sun, approximately 60% of its mass will get expelled in the outer layers, while the remaining 40% remains in the core. The more massive a star becomes, the more mass, percentage-wise, gets blown off in its outer layers, with less being retained in the core.
What happens, then, if you were to take a star like our Sun — with the mass, volume, and rotation speed of the Sun — and compressed it down into a volume the size of the Earth: a typical size for a white dwarf? Unsurprisingly, then, you might start to ask about neutron stars or black holes: even more extreme objects. A neutron star is typically the product of a much more massive star ending its life in a supernova, where the particles in the core get so compressed that it behaves as one giant atomic nucleus composed almost exclusively of neutrons. Neutron stars are typically twice the mass of our Sun, but just about 10-to-40 km across.
This computer simulation of a neutron star shows charged particles being whipped around by a neutron star’s extraordinarily strong electric and magnetic fields. The fastest-spinning neutron star we’ve ever discovered is a pulsar that revolves 766 times per second: faster than our Sun would spin if we collapsed it down to the size of a neutron star.
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