DemoDisk wrote:

I'm new here, so please excuse, but what would happen to the material in a
neutron star if it could be separated from the rest? Wouldn't a 30-ton mass
explode into whatever volume it formerly occupied before gravity collapsed
the star? Would it be 30 tons of dust [Hoovering joke to follow], or does
the neutron star create an entirely new form of matter?

Those are good questions. Neutron stars are supposed to be made of a
special state of matter called "neutronium", but I don't think it's
"entirely new" in that it works pretty much like a gigantic atomic
nucleus. It wouldn't be stable without the enormous gravitational
strength of some large 'critical mass', on the order of the Sun's. I
don't know how one would go about breaking a piece off, but I suppose
that if one could it would behave pretty much like a thermonuclear
device -- or a 'micro-star'!

See http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9707230.

--
Odysseus