# Tag Info

5

10km is about right, 5km is definitely wrong and there are theoretical arguments and also observational evidence that this is the case. The Schwarzschild radius, inside which an object would be a black hole, is $3(M/M_{\odot})$ km. As neutron stars have a typical mass of $1.5M_{\odot}$ then a 5km radius would have them hovering just above disappearing ...

3

Most of the books which I looked at give approximately 10 km as the radius of a neutron star. Just yesterday I looked at a book by Dave Goldberg titled The Universe In the Rearview Mirror (2013) which says that they're "only about 5 km in radius" [p.225]. Is this true, [i.e., is there some recent evidence for this], or did he make a mistake here? These are ...

1

5 km in radius seems like a mistake. a 3 solar mass object has a schwarzschild radius of about 9.0 km. (Hence the 10 km estimate for the size of a Neutron star). A little smaller than that and it becomes a black hole. Also, as I understand it, Neutron stars, like white dwarfs, grow smaller as they add mass. Less massive Neutron stars in the 1.4-1.5 ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible