Squishy or Solid? A Neutron Star’s Insides Open to Debate

The alerts started in the early morning of Aug. 17. Gravitational waves produced by the wreck of two neutron stars—dense cores of dead stars—had washed over Earth. The thousand-plus physicists of the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory rushed to decode the space-time vibrations that rolled across the detectors like a drawn-out peal of thunder. Thousands …

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