A Spoonful of This Dead Star Weighs More Than an Elephant

A spoonful of this dead star would outweigh an elephant.

It is a white dwarf, the dead core of a Sun-like star, packing much of the Sun's mass into a ball the size of Earth.

When a Sun-like star runs out of fuel, it sheds its outer layers and leaves the bare core behind. Nothing is fusing anymore, so gravity tries to crush it. What stops the collapse is a strange quantum rule: electrons refuse to be packed into the same state. This electron degeneracy pressure holds the star up with no heat at all. The result is matter a million times denser than anything on Earth. One sugar-cube-sized piece would weigh about a ton, and its gravity is a hundred thousand times stronger than Earth's.

Here is the twist: the more mass a white dwarf gains, the smaller it gets. Add enough and it collapses past a breaking point, and the whole star detonates.

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