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Magnetars are among the most extreme objects in the universe, and that says a lot. These stellar remnants are neutron stars, but while most neutron stars are quiet and remain isolated, magnetars have magnetic fields billions of times stronger than those on Earth, and they can be the source of the mysterious. rapid radio bursts that astronomers have tracked in recent years. We’ve never seen a magnetar come into being, but a new high-energy event several billion light-years away could be the first – a kilonova that signals the fusion of two neutron stars.
Neutron stars, white dwarfs, and black holes are all stellar remnants that we hear about regularly. The fate of a main sequence star to become one of these objects is primarily a function of its mass. Bigger stars become black holes, while smaller stars become neutron stars. A star like the sun will eventually collapse into a white dwarf. A neutron star can also become a pulsar or a magnetar, depending on its properties. Other neutron stars can fuse with each other to become magnetars, and that’s what astronomers think they’ve spotted.
Scientists believe that magnetars produce their ultra-strong magnetic field thanks to a superconducting material moving inside. The effects of such strong magnetic fields are almost unfathomable, so naturally the formation of such an object is a highly energetic event. The main theories claim that magnetars can be born when two small neutron stars collide. If they’re too big, the resulting object is a black hole, but with just the right mass, you end up with a magnetar.
Last May, astronomers detected a gamma beacon from an object more than 5.5 billion light years away. This matched the theoretical signature of a magnetar formation, so teams around the world turned their most powerful instruments to the source, including NASA’s Swift Observatory in space, the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The best data came from none other than the ever-reliable Hubble Space Telescope.
Hubble successfully detected infrared emission (see above) from the formation of heavy elements like gold, platinum and uranium. This is another thing astronomers expect to see in a neutron star collision, sometimes referred to as a kilonova. The team notes that the infrared signal was much brighter than expected – 10 times brighter, in fact. For some, this could be a confirmation of the formation of the magnetar. If the neutron stars had formed a black hole, the IR emission would have been within expected limits.
This research still needs to be validated by other teams, but it is available on the arXiv.org preprint server. If confirmed, this would be the first time we’ve seen a magnetar being born, and the massive energy output recorded by Hubble could reveal a lot about how these bizarre objects work.
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