In the previous article, I talked about neutron stars, and like pretty much everybody else who’s ever tried to describe a neutron star’s absurd density, I explained that a piece of a neutron star the size of a 500-micron grain of sand would weigh as much as a small cargo ship.

That’s the kind of scientific example I like: it uses to comprehensible objects to illustrate something that would otherwise be pretty much impossible to visualize. I know the mass of a cargo ship isn’t exactly intuitive, but it’s more intuitive than saying 2e17 kilograms per cubic meter.

But one thing such examples gloss over is just how hard it is to pack this much mass so close together. In order to reach the pressures and temperatures necessary for fusion, we need the mass of the entire Sun, and that still only compresses the Sun’s core to 1.5e5 kilograms per cubic meter. It takes a truly massive star that has no way to maintain its internal temperature to compress matter the rest of the way and keep it there.

Neutron stars are supported almost entirely by neutron-degeneracy pressure, which, to seriously oversimplify matters, is a product of the fact that neutrons don’t like to occupy the same quantum state, and therefore don’t like to be brought too close together. It produces a lot of pressure. Enough to support 1.38 solar masses or more against a surface gravity of 100 billion gees. It also means that if we got really literal and took an actual piece out of a neutron star, it would not end well.

Let’s say we teleported a cube of neutron fluid, at a density of 2e17 kilograms per cubic meter and 3,000,000 Kelvin, into the air a meter over an empty field on Earth. The pressure exerted by all those neutrons packed too close together is complicated to calculate, but would probably be in the neighborhood of 5e33 pascals, or about 5e18 atmospheres. That’s a million trillion times higher than the pressure during the detonation of a hydrogen bomb.

That’s a lot of energy in one place, but as we’ve learned while trying to kill humanity with a BB gun and contemplating killer asteroids, even when you deposit a ridiculous amount of energy into a small volume, if there’s enough matter around it, eventually, it’ll be converted into a more ordinary form. This is another way of saying that, up to a certain limit, all explosions are going to behave a lot like scaled-up nuclear explosions.

But a whole lot of interesting shit is going to happen very rapidly before we get to that point. First, our grain of neutronium (which, admit it, sounds way cooler than “neutron superfluid,” cool as that one is) will expand rapidly. This will cause its pressure to decrease, and so it’ll be a lot like ascending through the layers of a neutron star, moving from outer core to crust. When the pressure drops low enough, many of the neutrons will decay into protons, emitting electrons and neutrinos. Neutrinos are infamous for carrying off energy, and also for refusing to interact with things. They might heat the ground below them by a few fractions of a degree, but considering that they pass right through the Earth without difficulty, they’re probably not important, except in the fact that they’ll cool the nuclear matter down.

Now, our grain of neutronium is a slightly larger grain of protons and neutrons all mashed together. Without the surrounding pressure to force them unnaturally close, the protons will naturally repel each other. They’ll still be attracted to each other and to the neutrons via the strong force, but once again, without the ridiculous pressures provided by the bulk of a neutron star, their clustering will be limited by the short range of the strong force. That is to say, they’ll stop being a soup of nucleons and go back to being atomic nuclei.

These nuclei will start out quite heavy, but the falling pressure will cause them to rapidly fission and give off a lot of radiation. There’ll be a lot of gamma rays, a lot of stray protons and neutrons, a lot of alpha particles, and probably a lot of beta decays producing protons and electrons from neutrons. It’d take a particle physicist to tell you exactly what elements to expect in the fallout, but I’d wager it’d mostly be lead, iron, hydrogen, and helium, with a smattering of lighter and heavier elements.

By now, we’re dealing with energies too low for massive neutrino emission, so the only way this expanding sphere of plasma can lose energy is by emitting traditional electromagnetic radiation and by expanding. It is now, for all intents and purposes, an extremely hot and extremely small version of a nuclear fireball.

How big would the fireball ultimately get? That depends on a lot of things: first, on how much energy was initially contained in our deadly granule. Second, on how much of that energy got carried off by the snobbish non-interacting neutrinos. It’s hard to be certain how much potential energy would have been in the grain to start with, but I’ve read that the neutron degeneracy pressure of neutronium is one third of its mass density. E = m * c^2, so mass density is just energy density. One third of the energy density of our grain of neutronium comes out to about 7.5e23 joules, which is of the same order of magnitude as the Chicxulub impact. So, even though we’re dealing with a very exotic explosion, we know that it’s not the kind of explosion that’s going to blow off the entire atmosphere or boil all the oceans. And actually, since so much energy is likely to be lost to neutrinos (neutrinos carry off 99% of the energy in supernovae, which considering that they still shine as bright as 10 billion suns, is horrifying to contemplate), it could be an almost-ordinary thermonuclear explosion. But, because I don’t know exactly how much energy we’re losing to neutrinos here, I’m going to assume the whole 7.5e23 joules is going to get deposited in the atmosphere.

Using this number, we can estimate the relevant parameters by using the excellent Impact Effects program, written by some very nifty folks. This program is, as far as I’m concerned, justification enough for the existence of the Internet all by itself. By assuming a stony asteroid 12 kilometers across, impacting perpendicular to the ground at 22 kilometers per second, we get an impact energy in the right ballpark.

The fireball would grow to massive proportions. As we learned from nuclear tests, hot plasma is pretty much completely opaque to radiation, since it’s got electrons flying around loose, and since photons like to bounce off of electrons. An initial burst of gamma rays would escape, but much of the radiation from our exploding grain of neutronium would be trapped in the plasma bubble, bouncing around while the bubble expanded at high speed. This bubble would reach a radius of 95 kilometers, reaching vertically to near the edge of space and pushing a massive shockwave out in front of it. Anything that happened to be caught within the fireball wouldn’t be destroyed. It wouldn’t even be vaporized. It would be flash-ionized into hot plasma. But, once the bubble had expanded to 95 kilometers in radius, it would finally have cooled enough to de-ionize and become transparent to ordinary radiation again.

This is very briefly good news for the people in the surrounding area, since it means they’re not going to get smacked in the face with a wall of plasma at 5000 degrees. Then, it becomes very bad news, since there’s a lot of thermal energy in that fireball that can now suddenly escape. The fireball would be visible from 1,100 kilometers away, and possibly farther, if you’re unlucky enough to be in an airliner or on a mountain. And if this fireball is visible to you, that pretty much means you’re dead. We’re looking at flash-fires and third-degree burns for five hundred miles in every direction.

About an hour later, the people at 1,200 kilometers, for whom the fireball was below the horizon, would stop being lucky: the blast wave would arrive, bringing overpressures of almost 2 atmospheres (enough to blow down just about any building) and wind speeds of 610 miles an hour (enough to blow down just about any building).

But the disaster would only just be beginning. Here, the peculiar origin of the explosion would make itself apparent: there would likely be a lot of radioactive fallout, and it would be made of peculiar isotopes generated in a flash when those protons and neutrons were separating into nuclei again. Not only that, with all the ionizing radiation, there would be even more nitric oxide in the plume than usual. Imagine if you will a pancake-shaped incandescent cloud hundreds of kilometers across–the size of a country. This cloud glows from within a larger, dark-red cloud of nitric oxide, ozone, iron, lead, and radioactive dust. Over the course of hours, the upper half of the cloud collapses downward as it cools, while the other half rises buoyantly upward. Within days, there’s a sheet of opaque vapor thousands of kilometers across, trapped in the stratosphere, blowing with the winds, fed from below by a firestorm of a kind not seen for 65 million years. Smoke and dust circle the planet within weeks. Temperatures drop far below freezing. People and animals are poisoned by toxic gases. With the sunlight blotted out, plants die. People starve. There’s a mass extinction. Only the hardiest species survive. After the dust settles out and the climate rebounds, new creatures populate the Earth. The only reminder of the catastrophe is a thin layer of exotic elements, and a crater 160 kilometers across and 2 kilometers deep. Perhaps if Earth ever spawns another species that spawns paleontologists, they will think the crater came from an asteroid impact. But it didn’t. It was created by an object the size of a grain of sand.

So take this as a grim warning: Under no circumstances should you take a useful scientific analogy so literally that you actually remove a piece of an exotic compact star and transport it to a planet. And they say you can’t learn anything from psychotic bloggers!