20. One Spoonful Of Matter From A Neutron Star Would Weigh About A Billion Tons

20. One Spoonful Of Matter From A Neutron Star Would Weigh About A Billion Tons

Some things weigh more than others. That's not news to anybody - if you lifted up a plastic chair, and then lifted up a wooden one, you'd expect the wooden one to be harder to pick off the floor. Stars can be made of different materials, too, but the differences in weight are literally astronomical.

Neutron stars are what's left when huge stars - those four or more times larger than our own Sun - explode. The remaining matter at the center is compacted so tightly and so densely that a single teaspoon of the material would weigh around a billion tons. To give you a more visual idea, that's as much as 900 times the Great Pyramid of Giza. The gravitational field is so strong that escape is possible only at speeds of 100,000km/s or more - and if you fell onto it from only one meter above, you would hit the surface at four and a half million miles per hour. At such a force, your component atoms would be destroyed, vaporizing you.

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Did You Know...

I

Most of your favorite celebrities either studied acting in college or went straight from high school into a life of the arts. But, hey, not all of them. Some celebrities actually have advanced college degrees.

II

Turns out Mayim Bialik is just as much of a genius as the one she plays on The Big Bang Theory. She earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles, focusing on obsessive compulsive disorder among people with Prader-Willi syndrome, a rare condition in which the hypothalamus malfunctions.

III

Little known fact: Natalie Portman skipped the premiere of Star Wars: Phantom Menace because she was studying for her high school exams. She had two papers published in scientific journals while she was still in high school, and graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in Psychology.

IV

Before he was looking for answers on X-Files, David Duchovny was just trying to find the answers for English finals at Princeton University90. David graduated from Princeton in 1982 with a B.A in English. He continued to feed his love of literature by receiving a master’s degree in English Literature at Yale University. David was an excellent writer and poet. His work consistently received praise by his fellow classmates and teachers at Yale. His writing was even nominated for a college prize by the Academy of American Poets.

V

Sigourney Weaver graduated from Stanford University in 1971 with a bachelor’s in Literature. It was while studying at Stanford that Sigourney realized her true passion in life was to become an actress. Shortly after graduation, she attended Yale for their well-known drama program. She would go on to receive a master’s in Acting from Yale University and become friends with fellow famous actress Meryl Streep.

VI

Meryl Streep is considered one of the most successful actresses of all time. She is also one of the most highly educated. Before collecting an array of Oscars, Meryl collected diplomas. She graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in 1971. Meryl has a habit of being unsatisfied with impressive accomplishments as her acting career has shown, so she attended Yale University and earned a master’s degree in Acting.

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