A scientific team suggests that an unusual ‘living’ star, 3000 light-years from Earth, will become a ‘magnetar’, a kind of ‘dead’ star considered to be the strongest magnet in the Universe, was released today.
The star in question is HD45166, located in the constellation of the Unicorn, and sheds light on the origin of ‘magnetars’, superdense dead stars with very strong magnetic fields that can be found in the Milky Way, but astronomers don’t know exactly how. They formed…
Rich in helium and twice as massive as the Sun, HD45166 has been observed in the past, but now astronomers have concluded, from new observations made with several ground-based telescopes, that it has the most powerful magnetic field ever found in a massive star. , marking the detection of a new type of celestial body: a massive magnetic helium star.
“The entire surface of the star is as magnetic as the strongest magnets made by humans,” says researcher Pablo Marchant, from the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Louvain, in Belgium, quoted in a statement from the European Southern Observatory, which operates an optical spectrograph installed in a telescope in La Silla, Chile, whose data were used in the research, published in the scientific journal Science.
By definition, a ‘magnetar’ is a neutron star, a sphere about 15 kilometers in diameter, which has an extraordinarily strong magnetic field.
Neutron stars are compact remnants of massive stars that exploded in their death phase (supernova) and are extremely dense.
Some of these stars are known as ‘magnetars’ because they produce colossal magnetic fields, something astrophysicists still can’t explain.
“For the first time a strong magnetic field has been discovered in a massive helium star, and our study suggests that this star will end its life as a ‘magnetar,'” André-Nicolas Chené said, quoted in a statement from the North. American NoirLab Astronomical Center, who participated in the work.
Scientists assume that HD45166, which formed from the merger of two small, intermediate-mass, helium-rich stars, will explode (as a very bright but less energetic supernova) in “a few million years.”
During the explosion, the core will contract, trapping and concentrating the star’s magnetic field lines. The result will be a neutron star with a magnetic field so strong that it will make it the most powerful magnet in the Universe.
Currently, the record for magnetism belongs to the pulsar (neutron star) Swift J0243.6+6124, located about 22,000 light-years from Earth.
Source: TSF
