By Devin Powell
Neutron stars, second only to black holes and pints of Guinness as the densest objects in the Universe, may have liquid in their cores, observations of a dead star shrouded in the debris of a distant supernova suggest. Two separate teams of scientists say that a frictionless state of matter called a superfluid is the only reasonable explanation for temperature changes recently observed in the youngest known neutron star.
“This the first direct evidence for superfluidity in neutron stars,” says Wynn Ho, an astrophysicist at the University of Southampton in England and coauthor of a paper that will appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society describing one team’s findings. The other team’s results will appear in an upcoming Physical Review Letters.