magnetars tagged posts

An international scientific group with outstanding Valencian participation has managed to measure for the first time oscillations in the brightness of a magnetar during its most violent moments. In just a 10th of a second, the magnetar released energy equivalent to that produced by the sun in 100,000 years. The observation was carried out without human intervention, thanks to an artificial intelligence system developed at the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL) of the University of Valencia.

Among neutron stars, objects that can contain a half-million times the mass of the Earth in a diameter of about 20 kilometers, are magnetars, a small group with the most intense magnetic fields known...

Astronomers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) and CSIRO have just observed bizarre, never-seen-before behavior from a radio-loud magnetar—a rare type of neutron star and one of the strongest magnets in the universe.

Their new findings, published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), suggest magnetars have more complex magnetic fields than previously thought, which may challenge theories of how they are born and evolve over time.

Magnetars are a rare type of rotating neutron star with some of the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe...

By studying the site of a spectacular stellar explosion seen in April 2020, a Chalmers-led team of scientists have used four European radio telescopes to confirm that astronomy’s most exciting puzzle is about to be solved. Fast radio bursts, unpredictable millisecond-long radio signals seen at huge distances across the universe, are generated by extreme stars called magnetars — and are astonishingly diverse in brightness.

For over a decade, the phenomenon known as fast radio bursts has excited and...

Researchers from the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research have made observations of a new magnetar, called Swift J1818.0-1607, which challenges current knowledge about two types of extreme stars, known as magnetars and pulsars. The research, just published in The Astrophysical Journal, was done using the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an X-ray instrument aboard the International Space Station. Magnetars are a subtype of pulsars, which are neutron stars — degenerate stars that failed to become black holes but instead became extremely dense bodies composed mostly of neutrons.

Magnetars as well as some young rotation-powered pulsars — another type of pulsar — emit powerful X-ray beams, but the mechanism i...