What is ‘nuclear pasta’?
Strange shapes of spaghetti and other pasta types thread their way around neutron stars
When you crush the mass of a star down to the size of a city you put the constituent material under extreme amounts of pressure. The neutrons get distorted into structures of different shapes. These structures are 10 billion times stronger than steel, making them the strongest known material in the Universe.
As they resemble different types of pasta, they have been named after the Italian foodstuff. Near the surface of the neutron star, this ‘nuclear pasta’ takes the form of bubbles called gnocchi. Go deeper and the growing pressure compacts the pasta into a shape more like spaghetti, and go deeper still and it is compressed into flat sheets of lasagne. Although anti-spaghetti and anti-gnocchi are not pre-pasta courses, there are materials inside neutron stars with holes shaped like those types of pasta too.
The layers of nuclear pasta in a typical neutron star are about 100m thick, but still weigh more than 3,000 Earths.
So far nuclear pasta remains hypothetical, conjured into existence in the early 1980s and backed up in the last few years by highly detailed computer simulations. But it is also thought to be unstable, meaning it could be producing ripples in space called gravitational waves. If scientists could locate these it would back up the idea.