By Ron Cowen
Spinning up to hundreds of times a second and packing an entire sun’s mass into a sphere just slightly wider than the length of Manhattan, a neutron star ranks among the weirdest objects in the universe. Astronomers have for the first time discerned a hot spot on the surfaces of three of these cosmic oddities.
The X-ray–emitting spots, estimated to range in size from the area of a football field to that of a golf course, are the smallest features that astronomers have detected on objects so far away, in this case from 500 to 2,000 light-years from Earth.