The idea of neutron stars can be traced back to the early 1930s, when Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar discovered that there is no way for a collapsed stellar core with a mass more than 1.4 times the solar mass, M{in⊙}, to hold itself up against gravity once its nuclear fuel is exhausted. This implies that a star left with M > 1.4 M{in⊙} (the Chandrasekhar limit) would keep collapsing and eventually disappear from view.
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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Becker, W., Haberl, F., Trümper, J. (2008). Pulsars and Isolated Neutron Stars. In: Trümper, J., Hasinger, G. (eds) The Universe in X-Rays. Astronomy and Astrophysics Library. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-34412-4_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-34412-4_14
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