Word: objects
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...combination of radio and x-ray observations has unexpectedly established the existence of neutron stars. Spinning rapidly and emitting pulses of radiation, neutron stars are not really stars at all; they are ultradense balls of nucleons compressed by the catastrophic death of a massive star into an object not much larger than a typical city. Gravity is so intense that a teaspoon of neutron-star stuff would weigh about a million tons, a human would be crushed to the thickness of a postage stamp, and the entire population of planet Earth, if shipped to a neutron star, would be compressed...
Within the past decade, observations of x-rays from a handful of small regions within our Milky Way suggest that matter is being pulled into warped regions of space where gravity is almost unimaginably powerful. Such a regions not really an object, as much as a hole--a spatial domain from which neither visible nor invisible radiation can escape. It seems that the guts of black holes are unexplorable. But matter falling into such weird regions can, and apparently does, emit radiation just before being swallowed, perhaps forever...