large particle fluxes tagged posts

This artist’s rendering shows a magnetar outburst. A 2011 outburst of Swift J1834.9-0846 led to its discovery by NASA’s Swift satellite. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Astronomers have discovered a vast cloud of high-energy particles called a wind nebula around a rare ultra-magnetic neutron star, or magnetar, for the first time. The find offers a unique window into the properties, environment and outburst history of magnetars, which are the strongest magnets in the universe.

A neutron star is the crushed core of a massive star that ran out of fuel, collapsed under its own weight, and exploded as a supernova. Each one compresses the equivalent mass of half a million Earths into a ball just 12 miles across, or about the length of New York’s Manhattan Island...