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Originally Posted by ToSeek
Tiny Hot Spot Found on City-Sized Star
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Astronomers have detected a hot spot about the size of a football field on a city-sized star that is 500 light-years away.
It is the smallest physical structure found beyond the solar system, astronomers involved in the work said, though another recent study claimed to find beach-ball-sized structures in the picturesque Crab Pulsar.
The star is called Geminga. It is a burnt out shell known as a neutron star, the result of a massive star erupting long ago in a supernova explosion. Geminga contains about one and a half times the mass of the Sun. The material is in the form of neutrons -- able to huddle together more tightly than other matter -- into a sphere about 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) across.
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some more data on another neutron star
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=16736
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMLY9NQS7E_index_1.html
Using XMM-Newton data, a team of European astronomers have observed rotating hot spots on three isolated neutron stars that are well-known X-ray and gamma-ray emitters. The three observed neutron stars are 'PSR B0656-14', 'PSR B1055-52', and 'Geminga', respectively at about 800, 2000 and 500 light-years away from us