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takyon writes:

Weird 'Nuclear Pasta' Could Be The Strongest Material in The Universe

A really weird form of matter found in ultradense objects such as neutron stars is looking like a good candidate for the strongest material in the Universe. According to new calculations, it clocks in at a massive 10 billion times stronger than steel.

"This is a crazy-big figure," physicist Charles Horowitz of Indiana University Bloomington told Science News, "but the material is also very, very dense, so that helps make it stronger."

[...] This incredibly high density does something strange to the nuclei of the atoms in the star. As you move closer and closer in towards the centre, the density increases, squishing and squeezing together the nuclei until they deform and fuse together.

The resulting nuclear structures are thought to resemble pasta - hence the name - forming just inside the star's crust. Some structures are flattened into sheets like lasagna, some are bucatini tubes, some are spaghetti-like strands and others are gnocchi-esque clumps. Their density is immense, over 100 trillion times that of water.

Nuclear pasta:

In astrophysics and nuclear physics, nuclear pasta is a type of degenerate matter found within the crusts of neutron stars. Between the surface of a neutron star and the quark–gluon plasma at the core, at matter densities of 10¹⁴ g/cm³, nuclear attraction and Coulomb repulsion forces are of similar magnitude. The competition between the forces allows for the formation of a variety of complex structures assembled from neutrons and protons. Astrophysicists call these types of structures nuclear pasta because the geometry of the structures resembles various types of pasta.

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