NEUTRON stars may have weather systems like those on Earth. This novel idea
may explain why some neutron stars emit mysterious flickering X-rays.
Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of massive stars. They pack roughly
one-and-a-half times the mass of our Sun into a space about the diameter of a
city. In 1996, Tod Strohmayer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland
noticed that the X-ray bursts coming from some neutron stars flickered several
hundred times a second.
Strohmayer reasoned that the effect was related to the stars’ rotation, but
didn’t know how. “The question is, what would allow you to see the star…
