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Astronomers have discovered a unique type of star behaving rather strangely about 15,000 light years away, projecting its beam of radio waves in strange directions and appearing to reverse its polarity.
The Swift J1818.0-1607 magnetar, discovered in 2020, is one of 30 other such objects detected in the Milky Way (to date). Swift is rare, even among these privileged few.
Magnetars are supergiant stars that fail to become supernovae and instead collapse into ultra-dense nuclei thanks to their own immense gravity. Unlike other types of neutron stars which form the same way, magnetars produce extremely strong magnetic fields, hence the name.
Following a series of new observations provided by scientists at the ARC Center of Excellence for the Discovery of Gravitational Waves (OzGrav), the researchers discovered that Swift also emits radio waves, behaving more like a pulsar, a another branch of neutron stars, which project powerful beams. of radiation from their poles, rather than a garden magnetar.
In eight observations over a five-month period throughout 2020, astronomers noticed that the radio pulses had changed dramatically.
Swift behaved like a pulsar in May, exhibited some sort of faint flicker in June, then displayed a mixture of pulsar-like and magnetar-like pulses in July before finally settling in August in a more state. close to the magnetar.
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Increasingly, this bizarre behavior has led researchers to suspect that Swift may be the missing link between magnetars and pulsars that connects this dense and dysfunctional family of dead stars.
“This bizarre behavior has never been seen before in any other radio stronghold magnetar,” Lead author of the study, Marcus Lower of Swinburne University and CSIRO, said.
Now, researchers are proposing a possible new state of stellar evolution hitherto invisible to humanity, suspected that “The radio beam briefly turned to a completely different magnetic pole located in the northern hemisphere of the magnetar.”
They now hope to confirm this hypothesis by direct observation of such a flip to prove once and for all whether these weird, wacky magnetars are indeed a new breed or whether Swift represents a daring outlier.
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