A scientific team suggests that an unusual “living” star, 3,000 light-years from Earth, will become a “magnetar,” a type of “dead” star considered to be the strongest magnet in the universe, it announced Thursday.
The star in question is HD45166, located in the constellation of the Unicorn, and sheds light on the origin of “magnetars,” super-dense dead stars with very strong magnetic fields, found in the Milky Way, but astronomers aren’t exactly sure how they formed . .
Rich in helium and twice as massive as the sun, HD45166 had been observed in the past, but now astronomers have concluded, from new observations made with several ground-based telescopes, that has the most powerful magnetic field ever found in a massive star and marks the detection of a new type of celestial object – massive magnetic helium star.
“The entire surface of the star is as magnetic as the strongest magnets made by humans,” said researcher Pablo Marchant of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Leuven, Belgium.quoted in a statement from the European Southern Observatory, which operates an optical spectrograph installed on a telescope in La Silla, Chile, whose data was used in the study, published in the scientific journal Science.
A ‘magnetar’ is by definition 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 dying 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 astronomical center NoirLab, which took part in the work.
Scientists assume that HD45166, formed from the merger of two small, medium helium-rich stars, will explode (as a very bright but less energetic supernova) in “a few million years”.
During the explosion, the core contracts, trapping and concentrating the star’s magnetic field lines. The result will be a neutron star with a magnetic field so intense that it will become 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: DN
