The heaviest neutron star ever observed is shredding its companion

Using 2.35 solar mass pulsar spinning ~ 1.4 x 10^-3/s (700 or more times per second), I calculated rotation speed near its equator ~ 44880 km/s, the Sun is close to 2 km/s. Given 2.35 solar masses stuffed into a radius ~ 10 km, mean density ~ 1.12 x 10^15 g cm^-3, the Sun ~ 1.409 g cm^-3.
 
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Glad to see that my earlier speculation that a neutron star might accrete sufficient mass to become a black hole, so that there is no real "mass gap" that was discussed in a previous article.

Interstingly, Rod's calculated surface spin velocity is about 14% of the speed of light!

I wonder how much that counteracts gravity so that the whole thing doesn't collapse into a black hole at about the same mass as a slower or non-spinning neutron star would collapse.

Because the spin velocity at the poles does not provide any force to counter the gravitational collapse, I am wondering if some strange geometries might occur in the process of going to a black hole.

For that matter, does it actually collapse in the sense that the quark soup (or whatever) suddenly crushes to a more dense "something"? Or, does the mass just build to the point that the escape velocity at the surface reaches the speed of light, and we can no longer see light escaping from mass impacting the surface?

I did find this: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/mass-gap-dead/ .

And, it says something that I don't understand, specifically:
"While electromagnetic signals, like light, have their flux fall off as one over the distance squared, gravitational waves are detected not through flux but through their strain amplitude, which falls off as simply one over the distance." Stress and strain are one of my weak points.
 

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