In neutron stars, astrophysicists see a form of matter like none other
The stiff-to-soft-to-stiff phase transition in the neutron star is probably microscopic black holes popping into existence and evaporating via Hawking radiation where convection creates zones dense enough to collapse for a moment:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vttoth.com&#x2F;CMS&#x2F;physics-notes&#x2F;311-hawking-radiation-calculator" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vttoth.com&#x2F;CMS&#x2F;physics-notes&#x2F;311-hawking-radiati...</a><p>If we switch the units to kg, we see that a mass of 278000 kg (139 metric tons) has a lifetime of about 1 second. That&#x27;s a rounding error for something with a mass of the sun, or 2x10^30 kg.<p>I wonder if there&#x27;s a black hole oscillating in and out of existence at the center of neutron stars, creating a resonance that might be detectable.<p>Also as a thought experiment, we could imagine dropping 1 more atom into a neutron star on the brink of total collapse. The star would start running down the &quot;drain&quot; of the black hole, red shifting away from us beneath its event horizon. We&#x27;d see it grow redder and redder, dimmer and dimmer as it recedes from us, while staying the same size due to the holographic effect of black holes. If we jumped in after it, the red shift would stay the same because we could never reach the star, but we&#x27;d experience severe tidal forces until we&#x27;re ripped into spaghetti. Our clock would stay synced with an observer on the outside as we fall along the geodesic without outside forces acting upon us. Space just gets added between particles, which creates the red shift. I believe that passing the singularity means coming out the other side in a white hole exploding outward like the inflation at the start of our Big Bang, but nobody knows. We&#x27;re just not good at thinking about space expanding at faster than the speed of light yet. That might limit the spaghettification to some proportion of the event horizon radius and make the journey survivable for atoms in a billion solar mass black hole, but who knows.