By developing a new theoretical relation describing just how compact neutron stars — which are the remnants of massive stars that have gone supernova — can get, researchers have found a way to test the properties of nuclear physics under very extreme conditions.

As the collapsed core of a massive star, a neutron star is a small but incredibly dense object, packing up to three times the mass of our sun into a small volume. Models predict that neutron stars are about a dozen or so miles across, but their exact radius has always been unclear.

"Measuring the properties of neutron-star matter is indeed very hard and this is because while we can measure the mass of a neutron star very accurately, it is very hard to measure its radius accurately," Luciano Rezzolla, a professor of theoretical as

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