A billion suns' worth of energy spews from the 'Cosmic Monster' star

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A form of neutron star known as a "magnetar" is predicted to have high-energy outbursts triggered by "starquakes."

 

New research suggests that thousands of suns' worth of energy burst instantly from the core of a massive, magnetic star.

 

Magnetars are a type of neutron star with an extraordinarily high magnetic field, and they often flare spectacularly and unpredictably. Magnetars can be thousands of times brighter than the sun, but their eruptions are so short and unpredictable that they are difficult to identify and analyze for astronomers.

 

One of these flares was recently caught on camera by researchers who were able to analyze its oscillations in light output. According to a statement translated from Spanish, scientists concluded that the distant magnetar discharged as much energy as our sun releases in 100,000 years and did so in just one-tenth of a second.

 

When a big star dies, a neutron star is created. Supernovae compress protons and electrons into a dense solar mass with high rotational speeds and enormous magnetic forces that combine extreme gravity with high-speed spinning. 1.3 to 2.5 solar masses—the mass of our sun, or around 330,000 Earths—are compressed into a sphere with a diameter of 12 miles (20 kilometers) to form what is known as a neutron star.

 

According to NASA, a passing marshmallow would strike the surface of a neutron star with the force of 1,000 hydrogen bombs because neutron stars' matter is so densely packed that even a cube the size of a sugar cube would weigh over 1 billion tons (900 million metric tons).

 

Magnetars are the most powerful magnetic objects in the universe, having magnetic fields 1,000 times greater than normal neutron stars. Even when they aren't erupting, these bright, dense stars dwarf our sun, study main author Alberto J. Castro-Tirado, a research professor with the Institute for Astrophysics of Andalucia at the Spanish Research Council, said in the release.

 

According to Castro-Tirado, a magnetar's light output can be 100,000 times more than the sun's. In the case of GRB2001415, the amount of energy released is equal to what our sun radiates for 100,000 years."

 

It was like a "huge flare."

 

According to study co-author Victor Reglero, director of UV's Image Processing Laboratory, the magnetar that caused the brief eruption is located in the Sculptor Galaxy, a spiral galaxy about 13 million light-years from Earth and is "a veritable cosmic monster." The International Space Station's Atmosphere–Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) instrument observed the massive flare on April 15, 2020, according to a study published in Nature on December 22.

 

Because the flare lasted only 0.16 seconds before the signal dissipated to practically indistinguishable background noise in the data, the researchers could examine that brief, explosive energy surge thanks to AI in the ASIM pipeline. After examining ASIM's two seconds of data for more than a year, the researchers found that the peak energy pulse changed the star's magnetic field in four distinct phases, which they could map out using the magnetar's energy output.

 

Reglero said it's almost as if the magnetar wanted to advertise its presence "from its cosmic loneliness" by shouting into space with the force of "a billion suns."

 

Magnetar flares have been observed only 30 times out of nearly 3,000 known neutron stars, and this is the most remote one yet. Observations like this could help scientists better understand the tensions that lead to the bursts of energy from magnetars, according to a new study published in Nature.

Reference : https://www.livescience.com/magnetar-giant-flare-oscillations-ai

Image source : https://pixabay.com/id/photos/laut-bima-sakti-kapal-pelayaran-3605547/

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