Source:
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/3310...c-backyard
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/3310...c-backyard
Quote:As the mysterious object rotates, highly polarized or twisted beams of radiation shoot from its poles. Every 18.18 minutes, for 30 to 60 seconds, a beam crosses our line of sight, and the object starts to flash. “It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that,” said team leader Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker in a statement. Slow transients, like a supernova, might happen on a scale of days to months. Faster ones like pulsars flash on and off within milliseconds. “It’s just every 18.18 minutes, like clockwork,” she said.
These monstrous neutron stars cram more than the mass of the Sun into a sphere about 20 km across. But even at 50 times that distance from a magnetar, the devastating magnetic fields are incompatible with the chemistry of all known life.
Within a magnetic field of magnetar strength, physics as we know it becomes something… different. “X-ray photons readily split in 2 or merge together. The vacuum itself is polarized, becoming strongly birefringent, like a calcite crystal. Atoms are deformed into long cylinders thinner than the quantum-relativistic wavelength of an electron.”
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar
Like other neutron stars, magnetars are around 20 km (12 mi) in diameter, and have a mass about 1.4 solar masses. They are formed by the collapse of a star with a mass 10–25 times that of the Sun. The density of the interior of a magnetar is such that a tablespoon of its substance would have a mass of over 100 million tons.[2] Magnetars are differentiated from other neutron stars by having even stronger magnetic fields, and by rotating more slowly in comparison. Most magnetars rotate once every two to ten seconds,[14] whereas typical neutron stars rotate one to ten times per second.[15] A magnetar's magnetic field gives rise to very strong and characteristic bursts of X-rays and gamma rays. The active life of a magnetar is short. Their strong magnetic fields decay after about 10,000 years, after which activity and strong X-ray emission cease. Given the number of magnetars observable today, one estimate puts the number of inactive magnetars in the Milky Way at 30 million or more.[14]
