degenerate matter

American  

noun

Physics.

1. matter consisting of atoms that have lost their orbital electrons.

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degenerate matter British  

noun

1. astronomy the highly compressed state of matter, esp in white dwarfs and neutron stars, supported against gravitational collapse by quantum mechanical effects

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Example Sentences

A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star, a city-sized collapsed core of a massive sun that is made of degenerate matter and throws off lighthouse-like beams of radio waves.

From Scientific American

It and other operational observatories are already looking for ripples from the violent death throes of massive stars and from collisions of city-size orbs of degenerate matter called neutron stars.

From Scientific American

Degenerate matter is so resistant to further compression that nothing much can happen to a white dwarf unless, as is common in the Milky Way, it is part of a binary star system.

From Time Magazine Archive

For a star about the size of the sun, the collapse stops after several intermediate steps when the stellar material is compressed so much that its atoms virtually touch, forming what physicists call degenerate matter; what prevents further collapse is the tendency of the atoms' negatively charged electrons to repel one another.

From Time Magazine Archive

As its mass concentrates into a smaller volume, its gravitational field increases in power, eventually growing strong enough to compress the material near the star's center into "degenerate" matter whose electrons and nuclei have been pushed close together.

From Time Magazine Archive