Contact: Ken Kingery, NSCL, Office: 517-908-7482,
Kingery@nscl.msu.edu Published January 4, 2012 For Immediate
Release EAST LANSING, Mich. – The recent measurement of the mass
of the short-lived rare isotope manganese-66 has made it
possible for nuclear astrophysicists to pin down the underlying
heating elements of one of the universe’s most fantastic
phenomena—accreting neutron stars. Out in the cold depths of
space, billions of the densest objects known to man sit quietly
while their nuclear decomposition processes play out. But some
of them are hungry. Some neutron stars sit close enough to a
neighboring star for its immense gravity to begin pulling matter
from its neighbor into its own mass in an ongoing thermonuclear
process. But sooner or later, the fuel for the neutron star is
exhausted and it begins to cool rapidly. Through observations of
this cooling process and measurements taken at nuclear physics
laboratories such as the National Superconducting Cyclotron
Laboratory (NSCL), scientists can deduce