Space may not be the final frontier just yet since we still have quite a few mysteries here on Earth, but it does have its own share of unexplained phenomena. One of these mysteries is the neutron star; the remains of a collapsed star. NASA is currently observing what may be a neutron star evolving before their very eyes. Details in the full article.

Neutron stars take center stage again as scientists are probing their mysteries when they saw Einstein's predicted warping of spacetime around three neutron stars. Because of this discovery, scientists are now on a search to find exotic atomic particles that they can't create in a lab but could study by observing these warping effects.

Now before you think that this is a quest to build a phone booth that can travel in time to meet a way cooler version of Keanu Reeves as Ted (let me get to the point before I digress), we're not talking spacetime in terms of past and future. We're talking spacetime in terms of gravitational effects.

Basically, objects inhabit a place in spacetime that forms a kind of warping. The warping is like a bowl, and any object placed near the tip of the bowl automatically drops to the bottom center. Gravity is the same thing: objects attract each other because of the "bowls" they create in space time. The larger and denser the object, the larger the warped bowl effect, the greater the gravitational force.

Brief science lesson over. The spacetime warp effects were seen when scientists observed a disc of hot gas around the neutron stars. Neutron stars are very dense: a few cupfuls would be heavier than Mount Everest. Because of this, gravitational forces of the star pulled on the light from the disc and turned it red. This is called gravitational redshift, the effect stated by Einstein's theory of relativity.

Because of this discovery scientists have been able to develop a new technique of studying the neutron stars, allowing for a more accurate way of observing the effects of exotic particles.

Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a neutron star in Earth's neighborhood. The star has been nicknamed Calvera - after the bad guy in the 1960s western film The Magnificent Seven - and was first noticed by Robert Rutlidge of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

With help from NASA's Swift satellite, the dead star's position was pinpointed more accurately. The Swift observations showed that the dead star wasn't associated with any known astronomical object, branding it as an isolated neutron star. If confirmed, it will be the eighth isolated neutron star, joining seven others that have already been discovered.

According to BBC News, the term "isolated neutron star" refers to a neutron star that "does not have an associated supernova remnant, binary companion, or radio pulsations". Calvera's exact type has yet to be determined, and Dr Rutledge has said that "either Calvera is an unusual example of a known type of neutron star, or it is some new type of neutron star, the first of its kind".

Supernovae are a rare phenomenon indeed. Major ones tend to be seen only about once every 10 or 20 years. The most recent supernova, observed by scientists on Earth (before February 2006), occurred in 1998. The supernova (or death of a star) that was seen in 1998 was considered minor by celestial standards.

That explosion didn't even give rise to a black hole, as is common in the case of large exploding stars. A neutron star, common after smaller supernovae, was the final result of the 1998 explosion. The supernova that was observed this February was similar in size to the one in 1998; it was small, if you can call any supernova small.

NASA has a system in place that utilizes available technology to alert scientists as quickly as possible to instances of supernova in the vicinity and quickly pan their instruments and telescopes to gather data about the event. This particular supernova lasted an unusually long time (some 40 minutes); giving NASA's Swift satellite plenty of time to pan over to bring the supernova into view and gather as much data as possible.

"Usually these gamma ray bursts last fractions of a second to a couple hundred seconds," said Alex Filippenko, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. "This lasted many thousands of seconds. "The Swift satellite finds these things as soon as they go off, but the longer they last the more we can watch in real time, and others can turn their telescopes to it in real time."

Scientists continue to speculate about why this supernova lasted so long and what made it so unique. By getting such a detailed view of this most recent supernova event scientists will be better able to answer questions about supernovae from concerned policy makers and even possibly create technologies or methods to mitigate any possible hazards the Earth may face from gamma ray bursts in the future.

Neutron stars are what's left over when a star goes nova. About the size of a good-sized city (20 miles in diameter or so), but containing all the mass of a normal-sized star, they are incredibly dense. A teaspoon of neutron star matter would weigh as much as several World War II-era battleships.

It's known that these objects travel very fast, despite their mass - hundreds of miles per second, in fact. Even so, a neutron star recently discovered to be whizzing through space at nearly 1,000 mph (1500 km per second) seems extreme. Astronomers are scratching their heads trying to figure out what got this one moving so fast - and some are even wondering if their measurements are correct.

Frank Winkler of Middlebury College in Vermont and Robert Petre of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre used NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, taking pictures of the neutron star labeled RX J0822-4300 five years apart. Based on the estimated distance of 6500 light years, they calculated that the object was traveling at an astonishing 932 miles per second - faster than any such object yet seen.

"It’s a great measurement," says Shami Chatterjee of Cornell University, who has led similar studies in the past. "It shows that high velocity neutron stars may be even more common than we think." He adds that uncertainty about the distance to the neutron star's velocity means that the measurement could be flawed.

This one just goes to show how little we know of our universe. Recently, astronomers discovered a mysterious site: supernova RCW103, which is 10,000 light years away from Earth and contains a stellar object the likes of which astronomers have never seen before in our galaxy.

This object could be found at the heart of the supernova. At first sight, they dismiss it as a neutron star surrounded by a bubble of ejected stellar material, exactly what would be expected in the wake of a supernova explosion.

Upon closer look though, thanks to the European Space Agency's XMM Newton X-ray satellite, the very giddy X-ray emissions of the blue, point like mystery object cycles every 6.7 hours — thousands of times longer than expected for a freshly created neutron star. The object, now tagged as 1E161348-5055 and nicknamed 1E, is smacked right at the center of the supernova. Astronomers are now hypothesizing that 1E and RCW103 were both born in the same catastrophic event.

The team who have been studying this oddity isn't crossing out the possibility that the object may indeed be a neutron star after all. Apparently, one explanation for a neutron star's strange behavior is that it might be a magnetar, an exotic subclass of highly magnetized neutron stars. Of the magnetars that are known and documented, most usually spin several times per minute—much faster than 1E. But if the magnetar is surrounded by a debris disk, then that could be helping to slow down the neutron star's spin.

Another hypothesis that entered the picture is the possibility that 1E is a part of a binary system with a normal, low-mass star with only half the mass of our Sun. Binary systems such as those have been documented, but they usually involve systems that are millions of times older than 1E.

One thing is for sure though, the research team still do not have a scientific explanation about 1E's existence and its behavior. But surely, if they ever figure this one out, then this may lead to more information about supernovae, neutron stars and their evolution.

Like "black holes", neutron stars are the dead cores of massive stars that exploded as supernovae. Their neutrons are packed together so tightly that a teaspoonful of the material would weigh several billion tons.

For years, science has held that matter might be transformed into exotic states in the dense interiors of neutron stars because of the kind of pressures to which matter is subjected. Some believed that neutrons would break down, freeing the individual sub-atomic particles - known as quarks - of which they are made.

Another theory suggests that such pressure might lead to a form of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in which neutrons do not break down into quarks. Their individual identities blur, however, as they start to behave as a single particle.

A new analysis of one of neutron stars now indicates that free quarks - never found by themselves in nature - in fact do not come from the cores of these massive bodies.

The old "exotic matter" theories, as they were known, have been disproved in a study by Feryal Ozel of the University of Arizona. An analysis of the mass and radius of a neutron star known as EXO 0748-676, found that it is probably made of ordinary neutrons.

Ozel calculated neutron star's radius to be 13.8 kilometers (about nine miles). Surprisingly, however, its mass came out to over twice that of the sun, suggesting that the star's neutrons are normal. As the mass of a neutron star increases, it becomes more and more rigid. Otherwise, it would collapse into a black hole under its own gravitational force. Most simulations of quark stars and BEC-containing neutron stars predict they would collapse into a black hole before reaching this great a mass.

"I think the physical measurement procedure is sound," says Frits Paerels of Columbia University in New York, US. "The number that comes out of it is interesting. The mass is surprisingly large."

Most neutron stars whose masses have been measured previously are no more than 1.4 to 1.5 times the mass of the Sun - but their actual sizes in terms of volume have been difficult determine, making the nature of the matter inside unclear.

Ozel says the fact that squishy, exotic states of matter do not seem to occur in a star this massive indicates that "exotic states" simply don't exist in these neutron stars.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has revealed important details of J0617, a neutron star that is spewing out a wake of high-energy particles as it speeds through space. The deduced location of the neutron star on the edge of a supernova remnant, and the peculiar orientation of the neutron star wake are two mysteries that have yet to be solved by astronomers.

The neutron star, known as CXOU J061705.3+222127, or J0617 for short, appears to lie near the outer edge of an expanding bubble of hot gas associated with the supernova remnant IC 443. It is presumed that J0617 was created about 30,000 years ago at the time of the supernova, and propelled away from explosion site at 500,000 miles per hour. However, the wake appears to be moving away from the center of the supernova remnant. The misalignment raised doubt about the link of the neutron star with the supernova remnant.

Bryan Gaensler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, MA and his colleagues have strong evidence that J0617 was born in the same explosion that created the supernova remnant:

First, the shape of the neutron star's wake indicates it is moving a little faster than the speed of sound in the remnant's multimillion-degree gas. The velocity that one can then calculate from this conclusion closely matches the predicted pace of the neutron star. In contrast, if the neutron star were outside the confines of the remnant, its inferred speed would be a sluggish 20,000 miles per hour. Also, the measured temperature of the neutron star matches that of one born at the same time of the supernova remnant.

If that's the case, what then could be causing the misalignment? Gaensler speculates that the doomed progenitor star was moving at a high speed prior to explosion, hence the neutron star was born off-center. Cross-winds might have just pushed the wake further away from the supernova remnant.