The Neutron Star Project is an interactive, open-source 3D catalog visualizer for neutron stars one of the most extreme classes of objects in the known universe. It aggregates data from multiple astronomical catalogs and renders them in a navigable three-dimensional map of our Galaxy and its neighbors.

The project was born from a simple desire: to see where all the known neutron stars actually are. Catalogs exist in spreadsheets and research papers, but no accessible tool showed them together, in space, at the right scale. This is that tool.

It is built entirely in Python for the data pipeline and runs in any modern web browser using Three.js for rendering.

This project would not exist without the science communicators who made neutron stars accessible, fascinating, and worth building something for. Their work explaining the incomprehensible in terms anyone can grasp is the reason projects like this one get started in the first place.

This project relies entirely on the work of researchers, observatories, and catalog maintainers who have spent careers building the datasets that make a visualization like this possible.

Special thanks to the teams behind the ATNF Pulsar Catalogue (Manchester et al.), the McGill Magnetar Catalogue, the SIMBAD Astronomical Database, and to Andrea De Luca for the comprehensive review of Central Compact Objects that formed the basis of the CCO dataset used here.

Distance measurements for the Magnificent Seven are derived from the astrometric analysis of Motch et al. (2007), which provided the most complete compiled parallax data available for this group.

See the Data Sources page for full references and links.

The data pipeline is written in Python. The frontend runs entirely in the browser with no backend required.

Have a suggestion, found an error, or want to contribute data or code? All feedback is welcome.