neutron star 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...

This is a simulation of gravitational waves from a collapsing Neutron star. Credit: Luciano Rezzolla

Astrophysicists have found a simple formula for the maximum mass of a rotating neutron star and hence answered a question that had been open for decades. Neutron stars are the most extreme and fascinating objects known to exist in our universe: Such a star has a mass that is up to twice that of the sun but a radius of only a dozen kilometres: hence it has an enormous density, thousands of billions of times that of the densest element on Earth.

An important property of neutron stars, distinguishing them from normal stars, is their mass cannot grow without bound. Indeed, if a nonrotating star increases its mass, also its density will increase...

The neutron star (red sphere) with its strong magnetic field (white lines) spins around itself nearly 30 times per second injecting energetic electrons in the space region around it. The green and blue shaded regions depict different particle acceleration zones from where the detected photons could originate. The green zone lies in the vicinity of the pulsar’s magnetosphere, whereas the blue zone could be as far as 100,000 km away from the pulsar. Credit: Patricia Carcelén Marco

Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) observatory has found the most energetic pulsed emission radiation ever detected from the neutron star in the center of the supernova of 1054 A.D. ie Crab pulsar. It is the corpse left over when the star that created the Crab nebula exploded as a supernova...

A visualization of the strong, ordered magnetic field built up by dynamo action in the core of a rapidly rotating, collapsed star. Credit: Moesta et al./Nature

A supercomputer simulation of just 10ms in the collapse of a massive star into a neutron star proves that these catastrophic events, often called hypernovae, can generate the enormous magnetic fields needed to explode the star and fire off bursts of gamma rays visible halfway across the universe.

The simulation demonstrates that as a rotating star collapses, the star and its attached magnetic field spin faster and faster, forming a dynamo that revs the magnetic field to a million billion times the magnetic field of Earth...