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According to a new study published in Nature, astronomers have detected radio jets belonging to a neutron star with a strong magnetic field.
The team, led by researchers from the University of Amsterdam, observed the object known as Swift J0243.6 + 6124 using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large radio telescope. Array in New Mexico and NASA's Swift Space Telescope.
"Neutron stars are stellar bodies," said James Miller-Jones, co-author of the study, at the unit of the International Center for Radioastronomy Research at Curtin University.
"They form when a massive star runs out of fuel and suffers a supernova, with the central parts of the star collapsing under their own gravity.
"This collapse increases the strength of the star's magnetic field to several thousand billion times that of our own Sun, which then progressively weakens over hundreds of thousands of years."
Jakob van den Eijnden, a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam, who led the research, said that neutron stars and black holes were sometimes in orbit with a nearby "companion" star.
"The associated star's gas feeds the neutron star or the black hole and produces spectacular displays when some of the material is projected into powerful jets moving at a speed close to that of light," he said. he declares.
Astronomers have known the jets for decades but until now, they had observed only jets from neutron stars with much weaker magnetic fields. The dominant belief was that a sufficiently strong magnetic field prevents the materials from getting close enough to a neutron star to form jets.
"Black holes were considered the undisputed kings of throwing powerful jets, even while feeding on a small amount of matter from their star," said Van den Eijnden.
"The weak jets belonging to neutron stars become luminous only when the star consumes very quickly the gas of his companion.
"The magnetic field of the neutron star we studied is about 10 trillion times stronger than that of our own Sun. We observed for the first time a jet from a neutron star with a very strong magnetic field.
"The discovery reveals a whole new class of jet production sources that we need to study," he said.
Astronomers around the world are studying the jets to better understand what causes them and what power they release in space.
"The jets play a very important role in returning the enormous amounts of gravitational energy extracted by neutron stars and black holes in the surrounding environment," said Professor Miller-Jones.
"Finding jets from a neutron star with a strong magnetic field goes against what we expected, and shows that there are still many things we do not know yet about how the jets are produced. "
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A new twist on stellar rotation
Göttingen, Germany (SPX) Sep 21, 2018
What do we know about distant stars apart from their brightness and their colors? Is our Sun a typical star? Or does it show some properties that make it special or even unique? A property that is not fully understood is rotation.
In its outer layers, the sun has a rotation pattern that scientists call "latitudinal differential rotation". This means that different latitudes rotate at different rates. While at the equator of the Sun, a complete rotation takes about 25 days, the largest of which … read more
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