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Three times over the past 40 years, giant gamma torches have bombarded our corner of space. These giant flares are not dangerous and last about a tenth of a second. But they are extremely disproportionate compared to the usual gamma-ray beams that bounce into the universe. Since the first of three flares was detected on March 5, 1979, astronomers have reduced the source of these unusual events: tiny magnetars, generating enormous energy after an unknown cataclysmic event. And now, astrophysicists have a new theory of what these cataclysmic events are.
Magnetars are a type of neutron star – superdense objects that can overtake our sun, but they are about the size of Staten Island. All neutron stars have intense magnetic fields, but, as Live Science has pointed out previously, some are magnetic outliers, wrapped in lines of magnetic fields powerful enough to distort their behavior. In a new article, published Aug. 2 in the arXiv preprint newspaper, a team of Spanish astronomers asserts that instabilities in magnetic fields could briefly provoke the opening of a magnetar, l 39; leading to stripping the intense energies of his bowels. (The study has not yet been peer reviewed.)
To reach this conclusion, physicists have studied the equations governing magnetic fields twisted around magnetars. Most of the time, these fields are fairly stable. But there is a "branch" of solutions to the equations governing the magnetic fields in which the solutions are unstable. And these instabilities are catastrophic.
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The researchers wrote that the unstable fields were rapidly recovering, until they found a new stable configuration. They discovered that this process releases 30% of the total magnetic field energy in the rigid crust of the powerful small star, in the form of magnetic energy waves high enough for it 's energy. extend from the south coast of Long Island to Connecticut. This energy induces heavy mechanical stress on the hard crust of a kilometer of a magnetar.
"Our results show that, for typical magnetar field strengths … instability is likely to break much of the crust up to the inner crust," the researchers wrote. "For the most important magnetic fields, the stresses induced in the crust are sufficient to destroy the entire crust."
And the three magnetars that generated giant eruptions, they pointed out, have exceptionally large magnetic fields.
Once a magnetar crust is open, they wrote, a giant fireball would fire at an "ultrarelatavistic" speed, or a significant fraction of the speed of light. The whole process would take less than a second and the Earth is what we would see as one of those giant gamma-ray flares that astronomers have detected since 1979.
Originally published on Science live.
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