Neutron Stars: The Quest to Understand the Zombies of the Cosmos

by Katia Moskvitch

The astonishing science of neutron stars and the stories of the scientists who study them.

Neutron stars are as bewildering as they are elusive. The remnants of exploded stellar giants, they are tiny, merely twenty kilometers across, and incredibly dense. One teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh several million tons. They can spin up to a thousand times per second, they possess the strongest magnetic fields known in nature, and they may be the source of the most powerful explosions in the universe. Through vivid storytelling and on-site reporting from observatories all over the world, Neutron Stars offers an engaging account of these still-mysterious objects.

Award-winning science journalist Katia Moskvitch takes readers from the vast Atacama Desert to the arid plains of South Africa to visit the magnificent radio telescopes and brilliant scientists responsible for our knowledge of neutron stars. She recounts the exhilarating discoveries, frustrating disappointments, and heated controversies of the past several decades and explains cutting-edge research into such phenomena as colliding neutron stars and fast radio bursts: extremely powerful but ultra-short flashes in space that scientists are still struggling to understand. She also shows how neutron stars have advanced our broader understanding of the universe--shedding light on topics such as dark matter, black holes, general relativity, and the origins of heavy elements like gold and platinum--and how we might one day use these cosmic beacons to guide interstellar travel.

With clarity and passion, Moskvitch describes what we are learning at the boundaries of astronomy, where stars have life beyond death.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Physics, Astronomy

296 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2020

About the author

Katia Moskvitch is a contributor to The Economist, Science, and Quanta Magazine. She has been an editor at Wired UK and staff writer at Nature and BBC News. In 2019 she was named the European Science Journalist of the Year by the World Conference of Science Journalists.

Reviews

[Terence · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rating = 2.5+ stars

I was hoping for a book about neutron stars and what it's like to live in their neighborhoods. Instead Neutron Stars is mostly about the people and instruments that discovered them and have been trying ever since to figure out what they are.

[Dotty · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book has some good information in it. It is fairly engaging and very interesting. I learned a lot! However, I am not a fan of the style of writing and the excessive use of the phrase “so-called”

[Dan Downing · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes the prose becomes a bit flowery for a science book and sometimes the writing slips into the foolish, as "pinpoint the rough position". And numbers and acronyms get tossed around like sand in a tornado. But everything is good fun and in the name of science. We are not reading a physics textbook. We are in a travelogue, popping off to go around the world, checking in at optical, radio and otherwise bizarre 'telescopes'. Numbers astound. Like the gravity wave detecting interferometer with two right-angle arms measuring 3 km but set up for a functional distance of 1200 km. When a gravity wave passes over them, one arm will get longer or shorter and the scientists measure the change. Measure it, not eyeball it. The change will be somewhere around 0ne ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton. Uh-huh. Small. Exciting: it demonstrates the existence of gravity waves. That comprises a lot of Chapter One.
Moskvitch takes us along as she visits observatories around the world, some older, some not quite fully awake. She takes us to celestial objects billions of light-years away and into the lives of investigators around the world.
Engagingly written with some delightful insights and plenty of story. Occasionally we are given a detour, entitled "Deep Dive". Quite hip.
Mentioned again and again and visited is the Arecibo radio dish. The same recently allowed to crumple and die. Whoever was responsible perhaps should be closely observed. Arecibo was making important contributions to astronomy as recently as last year, yet most obits squandered their print mentioning its role in some insipid movies. (Insipid, yes, but truthfully my kind of flics.) Now it is scrap being reclaimed by the jungle? This makes sense?

Recommended.

[Gxianfranko · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is not nice to say: "...My, you are _so_ heavy!". Unless, of course, we are referring to a neutron star, because in this case it would be the plain truth.
Theorized by Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky in 1934, for thirty years neutron stars were virtually ignored, because it was thought almost impossible to observe them. Reversing the situation was in 1967 Jocelyn Bell, with the discovery of the first pulsar, one of the forms in which a neutron star can manifest itself. From then on, thousands of such stars have been catalogued: spherical "spinning tops" no larger than a city, they rotate very quickly, they are composed of really really really compact matter ("_so_ heavy"), they have a very strong magnetic field, they often have another star (or two) as companion, they may have planets...
All this and much, much more, is presented in the book written by Katia Moskvitch. It is a book that somehow looks like a neutron star itself... not because "heavy", but because _very dense_ with data, names, locations, numbers... But this must not dissuade you from reading it: go into the subject according to your interests and preparation (in my case, although I don’t know much about physics and astronomy, I think I have sufficiently understood the fundamental concepts - If instead you are a fan of astrophysics, you will feel like going to a party!).
It is a wide-spectrum book, a tribute to astronomers, physicists, engineers... to all the people engaged in the "great game" of "cosmic spinning tops".

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This account of the story of the theory and discovery of neutron stars is told from the perspective of a journalist who did a lot of research into the history, people and equipment used to confirm the existence of these amazing objects. You shouldn’t read this book for the science. Katia gets most of it right, but there are a few errors here and there. In one of her “Deeper Dive(s)” she states: “Go below 4,000 degrees (C), and the emission won’t be detectable in visible light…)”. Maybe she was just off by an order of magnitude. Maybe just a typo the editors didn’t catch. Another particularly annoying error is the assertion that doppler effect increases the intensity of the light bending around a highly dense object. Obviously, it is the frequency of the light that is affected, not the intensity. There are a few others, but I just correct it in my head and move on.
If you want a world tour to some of the great telescopes used to investigate neutron stars and similar phenomena, then this is the travelog for you!
Ms. Moskvitch provides a wealth of resources in the way of footnotes, so if you’re up for a deeper dive into a specific topic, scientific papers and books are referenced for follow-up. The Physics and Astrophysics of Neutron Stars (Springer) is now on my reading list!
I was initially put off by the casual manner of her story-telling, but once I resigned myself to the fact that this is a history of the science discovery of neutron stars and related phenomena, it was quite enjoyable.
The book excels at delivering historical perspective. Ms. Moskvitch recounts the story of neutron star prediction and discovery, highlighting the early, often accidental, breakthroughs in pulsar detection, such as the crucial work done by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. By focusing on the human stories and institutional rivalries, the author provides valuable insight into how the field of astrophysics evolved, and a nice flavor of the people and places involved.

[Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neutron stars are really interesting. I learned a bunch reading this. Of course I was interested in the theory, the chemistry of neutron stars, what's happening to those baryons and quarks when a star dies. There's also a pretty thorough introduction to all the telescopes involved in learning about neutron stars and black holes. I found these bits less enthralling.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent science communication

This book combines travel narrative and science journalism in the best possible way, and includes not only effective and informative footnotes but an index, which is costly and perhaps under-appreciated, but indicates for me an author who genuinely cares about the information they’re translating for a general audience.

[Brian Michael Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of the current state of neutron star astronomy and the telescopes used to gather observations.

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fantastic. Rich in scientific concepts as well as a look into the lives of several of the scientists. Highly recommend