Astro Weekly: Magentars, oh my!

Representing the collapsed core of a giant star, neutron stars commonly rotate about their axis once every 10 seconds and possess very strong magnetic fields due to powerful electrical currents in their interior. They are also some of the densest objects in the known universe. One tablespoon of substance from your average neutron star would have a mass of over 100 million tons. Good luck holding onto that spoon. As fascinating and ridiculous as these objects are, they have relatives that are even more impressive.

The “magnetar” is a type of neutron star that, as the name suggests, has an incredibly strong magnetic field. At approximately 109 to 1011 Tesla, the magnetic field surrounding an average magnetar is several quadrillion times more powerful than the field surrounding planet Earth. Within their magnetic fields, some photons are readily split in two while others merge together, the vacuum of space itself becomes polarized, and your household hydrogen atoms are stretched into rods 200 times narrower than their normal diameter. All this is to say that the environment surrounding these star remnants is awesome, in the truest sense of the word. Scientists believe the incredibly strong magnetic fields result from a magnetohydrodynamic dynamo process (wow, fancy!) that is facilitated by their staggering density. To add to the chaos, magnetars rotate much faster than their neutron star cousins, turning completely over on their axis once every half-second. They are essentially stars on crystal meth (or crack? You get the point).

A personal thought—I find it mildly hilarious that I was able to read up on magnetars this morning over a double Americano. We humans casually read about the most ridiculous cosmic phenomena and subsequently move on with our lives: supermassive black holes, exploding stars, and life on Earth. We are incredibly fortunate to share the universe with phenomena that are so much greater than ourselves. We should learn one thing per day that blows our mind.