Neutron Stars
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” [Ephesians 6:12]
Neutron stars are one of the mysterious wonders of the universe. They are created when an aging star swells to a red giant and explodes in a supernova, leaving behind a cooling core that forms into an ultra dense neutron star.
Earth rotates once every 24 hours, but neutron stars can rotate at fifty times per second, and their insides are hundreds of times hotter than the core of the Sun. A neutron star is so solid that one teaspoon of its material would contain more mass than 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza. To put it another way, this density is approximately equivalent to the mass of the entire human population on Earth compressed to the size of a sugar cube. The resulting gravitational force of a neutron star is so powerful that if an object were to fall from a height of one yard it would instantly hit the surface, traveling at around 4,500,000 miles per hour.
When the largest stars explode in a supernova, they can implode and collapse till they form something even more dense than a neutron star – a black hole. The center of a black hole is called a singularity. It is believed at the center all its mass is squeezed into a single point where both time and space stop. Within a certain distance of the singularity, the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing – not even light – can escape.
Did you know the Bible speaks of another great star that imploded? Isaiah 14:12 says, “How you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How you are cut down to the ground, you who weakened the nations!” And Revelation explains, “His tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth” (Revelation 12:4). The devil and his angels gave in to sin and lost their place in heaven.
Sin is the blackest hole of all. It pulls us in, and we can’t escape it in our own power. But Jesus has defeated sin, and it will lose its hold on us if we cling to our Savior.
