How the Universe Works

Recent discoveries indicate that neutron stars wield enough energy to annihilate planets and even other stars, demonstrating their capacity to completely destroy massive celestial bodies. This newfound understanding highlights the extreme destructive potential truly inherent in these dense stellar remnants.

Nightmares of Neutron Stars is a programme presented as an episode in the science‑documentary genre. It forms part of a series that looks at extreme astrophysical phenomena, and this particular instalment focuses on the most compact stellar remnants known to astronomers. The core of the episode centres on recent scientific findings that show neutron stars possess enough energy to tear apart entire planets. Even more striking, the research indicates that these dense objects can, under certain conditions, dismantle other stars entirely. These revelations underline just how potent a neutron star can be. By concentrating a mass greater than that of the Sun into a sphere only a few kilometres across, the resulting gravitational and magnetic forces become capable of catastrophic disruption on a planetary or stellar scale. The programme therefore highlights the potential threat such objects pose to surrounding celestial bodies. It presents the data in a way that makes clear the sheer destructive capacity inherent in neutron stars, reminding viewers that even the most distant objects in the cosmos can wield forces capable of reshaping whole systems.