Michelle Thaller

speaker

577 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Michelle Thaller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson · Running Out of Matter with Michelle Thaller · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

And it's able to actually get X-rays in this case, X-rays from neutron stars.

And it times the arrival of the X-rays so precisely, we can make a map of what the surface of a neutron star is like.

So they're tiny.

Neutron stars are only about 20 miles across.

They usually have about twice the mass of the sun.

packed into 20 miles.

These are extreme things and they're real.

I mean, we studied many of these and they're so incredible.

When you do a map of these and they often are rotating very fast, you actually get this strange effect on the side of the map because light is bending around.

There's so much mass, the curvature of space and time is so extreme.

two solar masses packed into 20 miles that you actually can see behind a neutron star as well as in front, the light curves around it.

And so, I mean, what an incredible real monster, right?

In fact, the neutron star group at Goddard said that neutron stars are far more interesting than black holes because with black holes, you have this dark event horizon that nothing ever comes out of.

You don't know what's going on in there.

With neutron stars, you got the freaking thing right in front of you.

I mean, it's still here with us.

And you can study something that has such extreme conditions that there's no laboratory on earth we can even study what matter is like under these conditions.

It's amazing.

But yeah, okay, so going back to why it's radio waves.

Neutron stars definitely do emit high energy radiation.

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