Nuclear Pasta is the strongest material in the world… well, in the universe. It doesn’t exist on Earth and you cannot even bring it here.
When a massive star explodes, not all the material is ejected into space. Some of the material collapses into an extremely compact object known as a neutron star, squeezing the protons and electrons into neutrons and neutrinos.
Of course, that happens to stars between 10 and 30 solar masses.
Neutron stars are the most intensely dense objects in the universe. They might have twice the mass of our sun packed into an object just a few miles across. Below the surface of a neutron star, protons and neutrons compete and end up forming long cylindrical shapes or flat planes known as nuclear pasta.
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. and Canada has calculated the strength of the material deep inside the surface of neutron stars and found it to be the strongest known material in the entire universe.
According to these calculations, nuclear pasta clocks in at a massive 10 billion times stronger than steel.
Such material doesn’t exist here on Earth. But if somehow a piece of nuclear pasta teleported on Earth, without the pressure of the star to hold it together it would explode like a nuclear bomb.
Simply put, this type of material can’t exist outside the crushing pressure of a neutron star.
The research also suggests that neutron stars could be generating ripples in the fabric of spacetime. That’s due to their strong gravitational pull. This rippling effect may be due to the irregular formation of nuclear pasta.
