What Is Nuclear Pasta?

No, it's not radioactive noodles -- nuclear pasta is the term for weird material produced in neutron stars. Learn why astrophysicists are so interested in how it works in this episode of BrainStuff. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain
stuff loring vogel bomb here. Nuclear pasta might sound like
a fancy concoction cooked up by a chef working in
molecular astronomy, but it's actually light years away, literally from
the spaghetti you'd find in the kitchen. This weird kind
of noodle is needed below the crust of neutron stars,

(00:23):
and in a new study, a powerful computer simulation has
taken a stab at manipulating this stellar noodle and found
that it's the strongest material in the cosmos. So how
did this nuclear pasta become the super Macaroni of the universe. Well,
it's because it's created inside neutron stars, which act like
extreme pressure cookers. Neutron stars are these stellar corpses of

(00:46):
massive stars that have run out of fuel and exploded
as supernova. These tiny, fast spinning objects are only a
dozen or so miles wide and yet pack in the
entire mass of our Sun. They're so dense that only
a teaspoon full of neutron star matter weighs as much
as a mountain on Earth. Neutron stars are therefore not
composed of normal matter, but rather what astrophysicists call degenerate matter.

(01:10):
It's not an insult. It's just the term for extremely
compact neutrons that are crushed together under incredibly powerful gravitational forces.
A neutron star is extreme gravity makes its outer layers
freeze solid as a crust with a liquid core below.
Underneath the crust, powerful forces royal between the neutrons and
protons inside the neutron stars matter, causing the material to

(01:32):
take on some surprising shapes like long cylinders and flat planes.
Astrophysicists refer to these shapes as things like lasagna, spaghetti,
and nioki, and collectively as nuclear pasta because astro physicists
get to make their own fun. Understanding how this nuclear
pasta works is a key concern. A researcher Matthew Kaplan,

(01:53):
a postdoctoral research fellow at McGill University, set in a statement,
the strength of the neutron star crust, especially the bottom
of the crust, is relevant to a large number of
astrophysics problems, but isn't well understood. Their outer layers the
part we actually observe, So we need to understand that
in order to interpret astronomical observations of these stars. To

(02:15):
get a better understanding of this noodly mess, Kaplan and
his team created the most complex computer simulation ever carried
out on neutron star crusts to understand how they warp
and break. It turns out that nuclear pasta is way
beyond al Dente. It's the strongest known material in the universe.
This is especially important as physicists can now measure gravitational waves,

(02:37):
the ripples in space time caused by massive cosmic objects
like neutron stars and black holes spinning, colliding, and merging.
The crust of neutron stars is therefore very important for
science to understand. In fact, low neutron stars may produce
their own weak gravitational waves by creating rigid mountains in
their crests. As neutron stars spin, these mountains would disturb

(02:59):
space time like a propeller cutting through a calm lake surface,
generating a constant source of gravitational waves that we may
be able to detect in the future. Kaplan said, a
lot of interesting physics is going on here under extreme conditions,
and so understanding the physical properties of a neutron star
is a way for scientists to test their theories and
models With this result, many problems need to be revisited.

(03:22):
How large a mountain can you build on a neutron
star before the crust breaks and it collapses, what will
it look like, and most importantly, how can astronomers observe it?
So the next time you're boiling your penny, take a
minute to ponder the mountains of nuclear pasta that could
feed us a lot about the nature of neutron stars.

(03:44):
Today's episode was written by Ian O'Neill and produced by
Tyler Clang. For more on this end lots of other
Noodley topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.