A closer look
Imagine dropping a spinning hard-boiled egg and watching it spontaneously speed up—that’s basically what’s happening in deep space. Neutron stars are the crushed, burned-out corpses of massive stars, spinning dozens of times per second. Their outer crust is an ultra-dense iron crystal, but beneath that lies a core of frictionless superfluid neutrons. Because the superfluid has zero viscosity, it spins independently of the crust. Occasionally, the intense magnetic and gravitational forces cause the rigid crust to catastrophically fracture in a 'starquake,' forcing the core's momentum to violently crash into the shell, instantly accelerating the star's rotation in an event astronomers politely call a 'glitch.'
