THE awesome power of an X-ray telescope orbiting Earth has revealed a sizzling hotspot on the surface of a neutron star some 500 light years away. The spot is about 60 metres across, making it the smallest feature ever seen outside the solar system.
The neutron star, called Geminga, is a super-dense ball of subatomic particles left over after a massive star died in a supernova. It measures about 20 kilometres across and has an average temperature of around 500,000 °C. But when Patrizia Caraveo and colleagues from the Institute of Space Astrophysics and Cosmic Physics in Milan, Italy, pointed…
