What Remains After the Collapse: The Physics of Becoming and the Stubborn Density of Our Survival
An unintentional science essay (and metaphor-heavy meltdown) featuring NASA, existential dread, and one very persistent pulse.
I should probably warn you: this one started with a stray tidbit of space trivia tucked inside a beautiful poem, took a hard left into the nitty gritty of star collapse, and spiraled quickly into a science-deep-diving, metaphor-chasing, narrative-collapse, astrophysics rabbit hole that spit me out in the territory of personal theology.1
I opened one tab and ended up with forty-seven, because I have a brain that magnets itself onto wonder and won’t let go.
The stars had something to teach me about collapse and survival, about pressure and transformation, about surviving the crush that comes when we become too heavy for our bones. And what remains when our familiar stories implode under the weight of their own understanding.
Turns out the universe has a flair for the dramatic (much like me). And sometimes, she tosses metaphors like the Milky Way across the night sky.
I was looking for a mirror in the cosmos, and I found the neutron star—this impossibly heavy, relentlessly magnetic, still-pulsing remnant of what once was fire and brightness and glory.
In it, I found a metaphor that could hold me—maybe it can hold you, too.
If you stick with me through this essay—if you let yourself sink into the story of the heaviest stars and follow their pulse—I promise I’ll bring it back around to something that feels like truth, and hope, and wishes on bedroom window stars come true.
And yes, there are footnotes, and yes, they contain actual links from NASA, real science-geek shit.2 I regret nothing.
pressure ∴ collapse
So, getting into the nitty gritty, did you know that a celestial body (say, a star or even a dense cloud of dust or gas) can become so massive it collapses under the force of its own gravity?3
From what I remember in that one college astronomy class, a star doesn’t grow heavier over time. It just runs out of the stuff (hydrogen, helium, etc) that keeps its insides pushing outward and prevents the star from folding in on itself.
That outward pressure holds gravity in check, until it doesn’t. Once the fuel thins and the fire dims, the star can no longer generate enough energy to counteract the force of gravity. So, gravity calls the bluff, overpowering the internal pressure responsible for holding the star together in the first place, and the core collapses inward. Sometimes, it’s quiet. Other times, catastrophic.4
If the dying star isn’t quite heavy enough to trigger a massive explosion, it sheds its outer layers gently and becomes what is known as a white dwarf. No explosion, just a quiet dimming and a slow fade as the core contracts into a dense ember of its former glory (can anyone relate?).
But how about the bigger stars?
Boom. The star runs out of fuel. Boom. Supernova. Boom. The star’s outer layers are ejected into space. Boom. Collapse. Boom. Black Hole. Boom. A new region where gravity is so strong that nothing—not even light—can escape.
As NASA so poetically puts it, the star does not go gentle into that good night.
Well, at least that’s what happens if the star is three times the mass of the Sun, give or take.5
outward force < inward pull
For slightly smaller stars, still called Supergiants, which only means they are larger and more luminous than your average, ordinary run-of-the-mill star (showoffs, basically), it goes a little differently.
If the mass is just right, if the pressure is high enough, and if the universe conspires in other mysterious ways to make it so, the force of that collapse becomes so intense that every single proton and electron in the star’s core is crushed into a neutron.
And those neutrons? Well, they stop the whole collapse, just like that.6,7
Bye-bye, wanna-be black hole.
This particular kind of implosion gives birth to a Neutron Star, the densest known object in the universe. This star is so dense, in fact, that its gravity can bend the very fabric of nearby space-time. Real sexy superpower, in my book.
In your typical Neutron Star (as if anything so mind-bogglingly astonishing could ever be called typical), the mass of our entire Sun is squishy-squashed into a (relatively) tiny space the size of the island of Manhattan.
One teaspoon of this baby weighs in at a billion tons.8 One cubic centimeter? Heavier than all the human bodies on Earth, combined. Think you’ll take a spacewalk and cram a little Neutron Stardust into a matchbox for show and tell at home? Well, at 3 billion tons, you’ll blow past any spaceship weight limits, and even the very best that Elon and SpaceX have to offer will have to tap out on this one.
We’re talking 1057 neutrons, y’all. That’s more neutrons than all the grains of sand in the universe, stars in the observable universe, or regretful love affairs chronicled with great angst in all four decades of my journals combined.
And I thought I was feeling heavy today. Whew.
But enough of my existential angst (for now), let’s get back to the science:
Although Neutron Stars don’t generate any new heat of their own, they’re so absurdly dense that it still takes between 1,000 and 1 million years for them to cool to a semi-reasonable surface temperature of around 1 million degrees Kelvin. (Yes, if you’re paying attention, that’s still way hotter than our little ole Sun.)
What do you make of that neutron dance?
pressure → fracture
The Neutron Star is the strongest magnet in the universe (only a quadrillion times stronger than Earth's magnetic field, not that I’m counting). That magnet is so strong it actually fucks with its own surface, stressing, twisting and distorting its crust until it cracks and shifts.
Ever feel so heavy or attempt to hold in so much that you start to twist and pretzel back in on yourself until the whole trajectory of your life kinda-sorta-definitely warps and cracks and explodes? Well, now you understand a Neutron Starquake9
Did I tell you this was the stuff of obvious metaphor, or what?
These violent self-imposed shifts? Well, they unleash gamma rays capable of traversing thousands of light years across the Milky Way. The beams flash in and out of view as the star rotates at speeds up to a hundred times per second.
Beams so blindingly bright that we first thought they were signs of alien communication, and so powerful that they create changes in our upper atmosphere measurable from right here on Earth. So consistent and precise, they could be used as natural cosmic metronomes, keeping time across light years.
In fact, NASA is now exploring how these pulses could serve as deep-space navigation beacons, guiding future spacecraft through the cosmos. Badabing, badaboom, and the neutron star reinvents itself into a kind of universal lighthouse, spinning steady and strange, ready to guide us into the great beyond.
From my layperson-science-geek-neurodivergent-brain-down-an-astrophysics-rabbit-hole viewpoint, a Neutron Star feels as different from a Black Hole as anything possibly could—as if it’s determined to distinguish itself from the void.
Maybe I’m projecting (okay, definitely projecting), but I’d say the neutron star is determined to be known.
So, where the hell am I going with all of this?
The neutron star does not succumb to the intense pressure in a way that erases it. It does not vanish. It does not dissolve into silence.
It becomes the strongest magnetic force in the universe. It pulses. It speaks. It wants to be known.
Whenever the scaffolding of meaning you staked your choices on, the structure you trusted, or the storyline you clung to shatters under pressure, there is potential for something new to form. Something denser. Brighter. Incomprehensibly strong.
One thing I know for sure: Whenever the narrative collapses, whenever the story is stripped to the bone, something is waiting to be born.
A million times over in this life, I have asked, “If everything I’ve built breaks apart, what will be left of me?”
The neutron star invited me to wonder:
➤What happens when the shape of a thing can't hold anymore?
➤What forms in the aftermath of pressure too great to contain?
➤Is collapse an end—or just a dense, pulsing, misunderstood beginning?
➤What if the story breaks without it breaking us?
I wrote recently about how the center could not hold, but we do (damn, we sure as fuck do). Turns out, the neutron star had more to teach me about that.
collapse → creation
For a star, the collapse begins when hydrogen thins and fusion falters. The pressure that once held back gravity begins to falter.
We’re not so different. Our stability depends on a fragile mix—emotional regulation, coping strategies, social performance, and sometimes a literal fuckton of denial. It’s a patchwork system designed to hold equilibrium and keep us upright. At the same time, we navigate the constant pull of trauma, old wounds, suppressed truths, and the constant weight and chronic overwhelm of surviving systems never designed to help us thrive.
We don’t get heavier over time, but life does. Layers accumulate. Responsibilities stack, grief compounds, defenses calcify. We become overextended, under-resourced, the fuel that keeps us stable runs dangerously low, and internal scaffolding breaks.
Like stars, we’re always in quiet negotiation with the gravity of collapse.
We hold through tension and compensation. And it works—until it doesn’t.
There is an eventual tipping point in all of us, where the center can no longer hold.
Sometimes gentle, sometimes catastrophic, collapse is inevitable. Again and again in this life, we go down to ashes and dust. I don’t know any way around that. But I know for damn sure it doesn’t have to mean the end.
What’s not inevitable? The black hole that we might assume comes afterward. The disappearance. The swallowing. The unmaking. That’s not guaranteed, though we often fight the collapse with all our might, believing that it is.
One of the ways we hold? It’s by continuing to become despite what might have taken us out.
Neutron stars are proof that something unimaginably powerful can remain AFTER the center gives way. Something that could never have existed if it remained in stasis.
The Neutron star could only be born from an explosion so big it would—if it occurred near Earth—bring a silent apocalypse, a light show of immense beauty that would mark the beginning of our planetary unraveling, obliterating everything in its path with light.
Sometimes, yes, the collapse is the precursor to a black hole void of impenetrable black, a mouth with no hunger limit, a gravity so grief-stricken it won’t let anything go. A pull so strong the shape of life as we knew it folds in on itself. It takes and it erases—light, memory, story—until not even time can leave a trace. We’ve all lived this; some of us don’t survive, others live on with gravitational scars.
If you’re still here, trust that another possibility remains.
collapse ≠ annihilation
A black hole is not the only aftermath. Not all collapse is annihilation.
Sometimes it’s compression. And compression remakes everything.
When we are sitting inside a personal rupture—emotional, existential, narrative—and instead of running from it, we follow the gravitational pull inward, we too can become living neutron stars. Our compacted grief turns radiant rhythm, proof that the pressure does not always destroy; sometimes it distills us to our core.
What comes after the unimaginable, after everything that ever mattered is pressed into something smaller, denser, more resilient, and undeniable? A force that can bend time, radiate life, keep a kind of rhythm the rest of the world begins to sync to, becoming a beacon, a pulse, a map of the stars.
So heavy we bend the laws around us, magnetic anchors tugging at the spin of orbits, warping light, and shaping the flow of galaxies.
So precise in our spin, offering a steady rhythm to the universe and keeping time for the cosmos, reemerging in thrum and returning to ourselves with every cycle.
So magnetic we call what is real forward, causing the unsteady to give way and relinquish its hold, releasing truth and light.
Yes, perhaps our messages resemble the chaos of alien signals to a universe not yet ready to decode. Still, we shine so fiercely that our pulse turns into a beacon.
Our beams sweep across deep space, a lighthouse for the aftermath.
We are survivors signaling in the dark, guiding the ships home to safe harbor amongst the stars.
Remember:
We don’t always get swallowed. We don’t always disappear. Sometimes the wreckage holds. Sometimes we become unbreakable.
There is gravity in us still.
There is a center.
There is weight.
There is light.
Will you emerge from the collapse changed?
Yes, definitely.
Will you recognize yourself?
Maybe not.
But you’ll still be here.
Still pulsing.
Full of starquakes and survival stories.
Your rhythm stitched across space and time.
A witness, a signal, dense enough to hold it all.
Go ahead, collapse. It’s okay. Some of the brightest, wildest things in the universe began that way.
After the impossible pressure, after the radiant collapse, you’ll still be here, the brilliant Neutron Star of you, the unkillable pulse of your core self, and that means something still wants to be known.
You can take the preacher’s daughter out of church, but it’s hard to take the church out of the preacher’s daughter, after all.
Fun fact: I have a science degree and once worked as a white lab coat-wearing clinical research coordinator.
If ever a scientific fact was made to be a metaphor, surely this must be it, so I’m running with it, even though I have no idea where this will take me. I’m just writing my way into my own excitement, which, honestly, is what we should all be doing all of the time.
Again, Christ, not to belabor the point, but how can one not build a metaphor here? Ever feel so heavy and pinned to this earth that you feel like you’ll explode/implode/collapse? Of course, you have. Me too. We just burn through our fuel—hope, denial, coping strategies, the illusion of control. And when that internal pressure fades? Gravity pulls. The old grief, the unsaid thing, the systemic fuckery too heavy to carry. Collapse comes. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes all at once.
Did you know we measure stars in units called solar masses? No? Me neither, but does it tickle me to know that our unit of measurement is rather like a kindergarten worksheet where we have to figure out how many of our suns we can fit inside a star to name how much it weighs? Hell, yes, it does.
There are so many more hot metaphors to come; stay with me—I’m learning as I go here.
If you don’t think this is super interesting or entirely dramatic, I beg of you, keep reading.
NASA says to picture cramming Mount Everest into a sugar cube. Which, frankly, makes me want to crash the metaphor-writing party at the astrophysics lab. This feels like peak nerd chaos, and I want a front-row seat.
Supergiants, supernovas, starquakes… make one think that the astronomers who name space-stuff must be a rather adorable bunch, filled with childlike whimsy. Actually, this makes perfect sense. Just a bunch of big kids who never stopped wishing on stars and dreaming of the moon.
Sources:
https://www.nasa.gov/universe/nasas-nicer-probes-the-squeezability-of-neutron-stars/
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/new-nasa-mission-to-study-mysterious-neutron-stars-aid-in-deep-space-navigation/
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/neutron-stars-are-weird/
https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/objects/neutron_stars1.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star
The poem that started it all, by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
This is so interesting and so much over my head 😅
But this part, so good:
Again, Christ, not to belabor the point, but how can one not build a metaphor here? Ever feel so heavy and pinned to this earth that you feel like you’ll explode/implode/collapse? Of course, you have. Me too. We just burn through our fuel—hope, denial, coping strategies, the illusion of control. And when that internal pressure fades? Gravity pulls. The old grief, the unsaid thing, the systemic fuckery too heavy to carry. Collapse comes. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes all at once.
“transformation,…surviving the crush that comes when we become too heavy for our bones. And what remains when our familiar stories implode under the weight of their own understanding.” Ah so many bones metaphors in this vast piece I’m reading with crutches at my side, a knee- high boot to support the bone in my foot that fractured 2 days after Solstice.
With my soul’s wiring it is almost impossible not to notice the metaphysical levels immediately and I’m grateful and trusting of those. At the same time my dedication is compellingly right here , in my feet, my hands, my heart, my breath.
The center is indeed stronger than ever in the reset.
Thank you for your incredible gift Jeanette