A quick-spinning stellar corpse is the most massive of its kind ever seen. The dead star’s extra bulk could rule out several theories about what these dense stellar objects are made of — and provide a celestial lab to explore exotic matter.
“For people who work in this field, it’s huge,” said neutron-star astronomer M. Coleman Miller of the University of Maryland, who was not involved in the new Green Bank Telescope study. “It’s a big new addition to our information about a state of matter that we cannot explore in labs.”