8 Horrifying Things Scientists Think Are Lurking Inside Neutron Stars

In 2018, a team of computational physicists at McGill University and Indiana University sat down with some of the most powerful supercomputers available to science and attempted something that no laboratory on Earth could physically replicate. They wanted to know what would happen if you tried to break the material that lines the inner crust of a neutron star. Not cut it, not melt it, not compress it further. Simply break it. The way you might snap a twig or shatter a ceramic plate. What they found when the simulation finished running stopped them cold. The material resisted fracture at a level so far beyond anything previously calculated that the researchers initially questioned whether their model had produced an error. It had not. The substance lining the crust of a neutron star is, by every measure their equations could produce, the strongest material in the known universe, by a margin so vast it defies any comfortable analogy.