The crust of a neutron star.
Stars don't have a surface. They just get thicker with depth.
But neutron stars are exceptions. They do have a surface, and it's made of the strongest material in the universe— nuclear pasta 🍝.
It is 10 billion times stronger than steel. So strong that you could hang the entire mass of Earth with one cubic meter of nuclear pasta. In fact, you could hang a few Jupiters before the it starts cracking.
The secret behind its strength is, while normal atoms are joined by electrostatic forces, nuclear pasta (mostly made up of neutrons) is held together by strong force, which is ~1,000,000 times stronger in this case.
It’s called nuclear pasta because it really does look like pasta! Let me explain..
There's a myth that neutron stars are entirely made up of neutrons. That actually happens only at their cores. In the outer layers, the pressure is quite low enough that some protons can still remain in the nucleus.
These protons, being positively charged, strongly repel each other, opposing the strong nuclear force trying to stick them together, which leads to the formation of all the sorts of weird shapes—
- Gnocchi — roughly spherical blobs.
- Spaghetti — long rod-like nuclei .🍝
- Lasagna — flat nuclear sheets . 🍮
- Bucatini — tubes with voids.
- Swiss cheese — voids inside neutron matter.🧀.
But it isn't tasty.