NP3M K-12 - Teaching teachers about neutron stars

A few weeks ago, on 10/04/25, I had the pleasure of participating to an outreach activity planned by NP3M in collaboration with Penn State University’s center for science and the schools (CSATS). The event aimed to teach teachers from local Pennsylvania schools about the physics of neutron stars, so that they could then share the knowledge with their students, and inspire the next generation of scientists.

Prof. David Radice organized much of it, planning a full day of talks and interactive activities. In particular, together with a few other amazing colleagues from NP3M (shoutout to Zidu, Somdutta and Tristan!), we put together two google colab notebooks to illustrate the effect of the equation of state on neutron star structure and showing how gravitational waves from binary mergers can be used to constrain the properties of dense matter.

Overall, it was a lot of fun! It had been a while since I last did outreach activities, and this was a nice reminder of how refreshing and rewarding they can be. I really hope the teachers found it useful, and that their students will appreciate how “cool” (pun intended) neutron stars are!