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degenerate matter
noun
- matter consisting of atoms that have lost their orbital electrons.
degenerate matter
noun
- astronomy the highly compressed state of matter, esp in white dwarfs and neutron stars, supported against gravitational collapse by quantum mechanical effects
Example Sentences
A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star, a city-sized collapsed core of a massive sun that is made of degenerate matter and throws off lighthouse-like beams of radio waves.
It and other operational observatories are already looking for ripples from the violent death throes of massive stars and from collisions of city-size orbs of degenerate matter called neutron stars.
Degenerate matter is so resistant to further compression that nothing much can happen to a white dwarf unless, as is common in the Milky Way, it is part of a binary star system.
For a star about the size of the sun, the collapse stops after several intermediate steps when the stellar material is compressed so much that its atoms virtually touch, forming what physicists call degenerate matter; what prevents further collapse is the tendency of the atoms' negatively charged electrons to repel one another.
As its mass concentrates into a smaller volume, its gravitational field increases in power, eventually growing strong enough to compress the material near the star's center into "degenerate" matter whose electrons and nuclei have been pushed close together.
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