ESP Biography

Have you ever wanted to learn about the most extreme objects in the universe? Look no further than neutron stars, which are the incredibly dense remains of collapsed stars. These objects are about the mass of the sun, but are only about the size of a city. A teaspoon of their matter weighs as much as Mount Everest, and if you stood on their surface you would melt into a puddle from the sheer force of their gravity! In this class you will learn about neutron stars, including pulsars (rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation from their poles) and magnetars (neutron stars with incredibly strong magnetic fields and sometimes produce bursts of energy called "giant flares"). By the end of this course, you will be familiar with how different types of neutron stars form, theories describing their interiors, gravitational wave detection methods using pulsars, and how collisions between neutron stars are responsible for creating many of the chemical elements in the universe.