A little about neutron stars

Our galaxy is littered with the corpses of dead stars. At the end of their useful lives, the vast majority of the stars in the Milky Way shed their outer layers and shrink to white dwarfs, dense spheres about the size of Earth. But very massive stars explode in supernovae and leave behind even denser relics, called neutron stars, which are only 20 to 40 kilometres across but weigh more than the Sun. (The most massive stars of all become Black Holes.) Since the 1960’s astronomers have observed a wide variety of neutron stars, including madly rotating pulsars that sweep radio beams across the galaxy and X-ray binaries that devour material pulled from their companion stars.