Question about neutron stars, any guesses?

I just watched a discovery channel show about strange stars, among them neutron stars with magnetar properties also. The guy said a pail of the stuff would weigh or mass as much as Mount Everest.
My question is, does anyone know if, for instance, you had an infinitely powerful force that could grab a handful of the stuff and take it out to space or to Earth, would it be stable and still be as crushed matter as it is in its native environ, that is to say in the interior of the neutron star, or would it revert to our form of matter and say if if held in an infinitely strong bottle and then opened up on Earth, would it form a mountain again or would it maintain its compressed nature?

Originally posted by sonhouse
I just watched a discovery channel show about strange stars, among them neutron stars with magnetar properties also. The guy said a pail of the stuff would weigh or mass as much as Mount Everest.
My question is, does anyone know if, for instance, you had an infinitely powerful force that could grab a handful of the stuff and take it out to space or to Eart ...[text shortened]... n opened up on Earth, would it form a mountain again or would it maintain its compressed nature?

This is my guessing of what will happen if you pull up a load of neutronium from a neutron star:

Neutronium is matter where electrons and protons has fused into neutrons leaving no empty space in between. It's a kind of compact matter. Its dencity is the same as a single neutron. So if a body consists solely of neutrons then the whole body could be treated as one, and one only atom. An atom without electrons and protons, only neutrons. A nucleus of neutrons.

Neutron matter like this is stable only in its compressed state. The pressure comes from the heavy gravitation in an neutron star. If you release it from it's pressure, then it's not stable anymore. It will explode when the neutrons will fly apart from eachother. Why? Because it's no forces holding the neutrons together so when the pressure ends they will fly apart.

But will the neutronium be ordinary matter again? Will a neutron break up in an electron and proton again, forming hydrogene and other elements? I don't know, but I don't think so.

A neutron start consists however not only of neutronium. In it's outer part it is more or less ordinary atoms, with electrons and protons. Under this layer it is neutronium as we know it. But where the pressure is even higher, in the center of an neutron star, noone knows for sure. Sometimes it is called a quark soup where all quarks are tumbeling around, not forming the usual triplets forming neutrons.

This is only guesswork from me, nothing more. Feel free to correct me wherever you think it's needed.

Originally posted by FabianFnas
This is my guessing of what will happen if you pull up a load of neutronium from a neutron star:

Neutronium is matter where electrons and protons has fused into neutrons leaving no empty space in between. It's a kind of compact matter. Its dencity is the same as a single neutron. So if a body consists solely of neutrons then the whole body could be tre ...[text shortened]... guesswork from me, nothing more. Feel free to correct me wherever you think it's needed.

I think nobody on the planet can say for sure. The only thing I can think is what force is it that would cause the neutrons to fly apart? The electric field I though was zero so would it be like magnetic charges? Would it be the strong nuclear force? I think the whole world is in the dark here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutronium

The term neutronium has been popular in science fiction since at least the middle of the 20th century. It typically refers to an extremely dense, incredibly strong form of matter. While presumably inspired by the concept of neutron-degenerate matter in the cores of neutron stars, the material used in fiction bears at most only a superficial resemblance, usually depicted as an extremely strong solid under Earth-like conditions, or possessing exotic properties such as the ability to manipulate time and space. In contrast, all proposed forms of neutron star core material are fluids and are extremely unstable at pressures lower than that found in stellar cores.

the rest of the article is interesting, too.

It would explode very violently, what is keeping it from doing that in neutron stars is the stars gravity. Once that's gone the neutrons would start to decay back to protons and electrons, this releases 0.78 MeV per neutron (compared with about 1-2 MeV per nucleon for nuclear fission) from the decays alone, so you'd get a blast of the order of a hundred kilotonnes to a megatonne per kilogram of the stuff. Since it's 10^12 times more dense than ordinary matter assuming a bottle could contain 100mL you'd have of the order of 10^11 Kg of it so the blast would probably be quite good to watch as long as you're not in the same solar system.

I wonder if we could make bombs from that idea.

Originally posted by DeepThought
It would explode very violently, what is keeping it from doing that in neutron stars is the stars gravity. Once that's gone the neutrons would start to decay back to protons and electrons, this releases 0.78 MeV per neutron (compared with about 1-2 MeV per nucleon for nuclear fission) from the decays alone, so you'd get a blast of the order of a hundred blast would probably be quite good to watch as long as you're not in the same solar system.

Yeah, gravity makes sense. So there is no other force holding the stuff together. Imagine the container strong enough to HOLD a kg of it!
Of course, a kg of it exploding at about 100 Kilotons would be only a few times larger than the Hiroshima bomb and about 1/000th of the big boy the Soviets set off a few decades ago. THAT would have been something to see, a 100 megaton burp!
But you wouldn't have to be in another solar system to see that, just a nice thousand kilometers away would do.

I wonder though, would that be the only nuclear reaction going on? Suppose a fusion got going, proton-proton fusion, couldn't that maybe happen also, that would up the ante quite a bit.