Astronomers Have Spotted A Record-Breaking Magnetic Field in Space, And It Is Epic

Far out in the Milky Way, about 22,000 light-years from Earth, a star unlike any other roars with a magnetic power that beats anything physicists have seen before.

At an enormous 1.6 billion Tesla, a pulsar named Swift J0243.6+6124 smashes the previous records of around one billion Tesla, discovered surrounding the pulsars GRO J1008-57 and also 1A 0535+262.

For a bit of context, your average novelty fridge magnet comes in at around 0.001 Tesla. The more powerful MRI machines manage to hit around three Tesla.

A few years ago, engineers gained a pat on the back for achieving a semi-respectable 1,200 Tesla, sustaining it for a blink of only 100 microseconds.

Thus it stands to reason that 1.6 billion Tesla is will demand some truly mind-blowing physics. The type only achievable by massive objects crammed into impossible volumes and spun at incredible speeds, fast enough to accelerate electrons to ridiculous speeds.

Swift J0243.6 +6124 was just regarded as a star worth paying attention to. A kind of super-compact cosmic heavyweight called as a pulsar, and it is the only X-ray source in the galaxy to fall into the ultra luminous category.

It is also the only example in the Milky Way of an X-ray pulsar with a Be-type companion star feeding it matter fast sufficient to generate radio-emitting jets of matter from its poles.

Those features alone add up to an only chance in our galactic backyard astronomers can not help but study in detail.

Measuring the magnetic field of a far distant object is easier said than done, though. As strong as they are, those fields rapidly weaken to become undetectable over distances of thousands of light years.

Fortunately, clues can be found in the manner in which the ultra-bright radiance of X-rays scatters from the electrons zipping down the magnetic racetrack, and something referred to as a cyclotron resonance scattering feature.

China’s launch of X-ray observatory Insight-HXMT in 2017 gives astrophysicists with a manner to catch signatures such as these in distant emissions, leading to the measure of electron energies in the GRO J1008-57 field in 2020.

Happily, an outburst of activity in Swift J0243.6+6124 following Insight-HXMT’s launch provided a glimpse into its own high strength magnetic field, with a cyclotron resonance scattering aspect buried within its X-ray spectrum.

Researchers from Chinese Academy of Sciences and also Sun Yat-Sen University in China, and also the University of Tübingen in Germany consequently analyzed the feature to calculate the energy of its electrons to peak at an impressive 146 kiloelectron volts, blitzing the 90 and also 100 kiloelectron volts of the preceding record holders.

Given Swift J0243.6+6124 is the exclusive ultra-luminescent X-ray pulsar in our galaxy, having an exact measure on its magnetic field provides astronomers a better idea of what may be happening close to its surface area.

As a sort of neutron star, pulsars like Swift J0243.6+6124 are made of atoms crushed into configurations far beyond anything we can create on Earth. Its magnetic properties help exclude or support different models that clarify how its highly compact crust acts.

Notably, the nature of the neutron star’s magnetism confirms the chance that its field is complex, consisting of several poles.

That is a solid win for astrophysicists keen to understand the mysteries of some of the most exotic objects in space.

For the rest of us, it is enough just to try to imagine the may of 1.6 billion Tesla magnets stuck to our refrigerator.

This research was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Read the original article on Science Alert.