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* http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Landau_Lev.html * J. Robert Oppenheimer was an american physicist, director of the World War II effort to develop nuclear weapons, the Manhattan Project, at Los Alamos. * During the moment of implosion of a massive star—just prior to the supernova explosion itself—the electrons in the core violently smash into the protons there, forming neutrons and neutrinos. The neutrinos leave the scene at (or nearly at) the speed of light, accelerating the collapse of the neutron core, which continues to contract until its particles come into contact. At that point, neutron degeneracy pressure causes the central portion of the core to rebound, creating a powerful shock wave that races outward through the star, violently expelling matter into space. The key point here is that the shock wave does not start at the very center of the collapsing core. The innermost part of the core—the region that bounces—remains intact as the shock wave it causes destroys the rest of the star. After the violence of the supernova has subsided, this ball of neutrons is all that is left. * 中央门-雨花台距离 Figure from astro-ph/0201465 * Hewish was awarded Nobel Prize in Physics 1974 The first observation of a neutron star occurred in 1967, when Jocelyn Bell, a graduate student at Cambridge University, made a surprising discovery. She observed an astronomical object emitting radio radiation in the form of rapid pulses. Each pulse consisted of a 0.01-second (s) burst of radiation, after which there was nothing. Then, 1.34 s later, another pulse would arrive. The time interval between pulses was astonishingly uniform—so accurate, in fact, that the repeated emissions could be used as a very precise clock. When Bell made her discovery in 1967, she did not know what she was looking at. Indeed, no one at the time knew what a pulsar was. The explanation of pulsars as spinning neutron stars won Bells thesis advisor, Anthony Hewish, the 1974 Nobel Prize