Neutron stars are the dense remnants of massive stars, more than 8 times as massive as our Sun, born at the end of their lives in a brilliant supernova explosion. These incredibly dense objects have masses between one and two times the mass of our Sun, compressed into a ball the size of a city, with a radius of just 10 km.
The research, published in Nature Astronomy, analyses a sample of 90 neutron stars in binary star systems with accurate mass measurements to measure the distribution of neutron star masses at birth, accounting for the mass gained since birth for each neutron star in a probabilistic manner.
This finding is important for interpreting new observations of neutron star masses from gravitational wave observations and the team used Bilby, a software package that OzGrav researchers developed to model neutron star mass distributions.
