Black neutron star significance

[phinds]

This BBC article posts no references so I wonder if anyone has any idea how significant it is?

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53151106

 

[PeterDonis]

This BBC article posts no references so I wonder if anyone has any idea how significant it is?

The headline and initial paragraph of the article are highly misleading. All that's going on here is that an object has been observed with a mass greater than that of the most massive neutron star previously observed, but less than the mass of the least massive black hole previously observed, and astronomers aren't sure yet whether it's a neutron star or a black hole.

If we had a more accurate knowledge of the maximum possible mass for neutron stars (all we know is that it's somewhere between about 1.5 and 3 solar masses; we can't pin it down more accurately because of our poor understanding of the equation of state of matter in this regime), we might be able to rule out the possibility that this object is a neutron star; but we don't, so we can't.

 

[George Jones]

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab960f

gives the journal article, but were they scooped by 17 or 18 years?

https://inspirehep.net/literature/590597

 

[phinds]

The headline and initial paragraph of the article are highly misleading.

Imagine my surprise

Thanks Peter