system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[physics] what happens to atoms when they are extremely crammed together like in black holes or in neutron stars? Are the orbits of the atoms overlapping each other?
gpt
Atoms don't really exist in either of the situations you named.

In a black hole there's no way to know what the matter is like since no information can escape the event horizon, but general relativity predicts that all of a black hole's mass is packed into a single infinitely dense point called a singularity, which is nothing like any kind of matter we are familiar with.

A neutron star is made of closely packed neutrons with a density similar to an atomic nucleus. It's almost like one gigantic nucleus, it's not composed of many separate atoms.