NASA scientists are tracking a star which is so powerful it would rip a human apart if they came within 600 miles – and they don’t know where it came from. The neutron star is so rare it is thought to be one of only about 30 in the entire Milky Way, which is made up of around 100 billion stars.
NASA has said the object – given the catchy name SGR 0501+4516 – has “comic-book-hero superpowers”, including a magnetic field “about a trillion times more powerful than Earth’s magnetosphere” – meaning if it flew by Earth at about half the distance of the Moon, every credit card on the planet would be wiped out.
“If a human got within 600 miles, the magnetar would become a proverbial sci-fi death-ray, ripping apart every atom inside the body,” a NASA press release said.
Magnetar are believed to be formed when a star becomes a supernova, exploding and collapsing down to an ultra dense neutron star. They are sometimes referred to as ‘zombie stars’.
Ashley Chrimes, lead author of the discovery paper published in the April 15 journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, explained: “Magnetars are neutron stars — the dead remnants of stars — composed entirely of neutrons. What makes magnetars unique is their extreme magnetic fields.”
The object was first spotted using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008. At the time it appeared to have been formed by a nearby supernova. But a decade-long study of its movement showed this couldn’t be correct, meaning it must either be older than its estimated age of 20,000 years – or have formed another way.
“All of this movement we measure is smaller than a single pixel of a Hubble image,” said co-investigator Joe Lyman of the University of Warwick. “Being able to robustly perform such measurements really is a testament to the long-term stability of Hubble.”
Scientists have theorised SGR 0501+4516 could have formed through a process called accretion-induced collapse. This is when a white dwarf – the remains of a dead Sun-like star – pulls in gas from another nearby star, becoming too massive to support itself, and exploding.
“Normally, this scenario leads to the ignition of nuclear reactions, and the white dwarf exploding, leaving nothing behind, said Andrew Levan of Radboud University in the Netherlands and the University of Warwick. “But it has been theorized that under certain conditions, the white dwarf can instead collapse into a neutron star. We think this might be how SGR 0501 was born.”
NASA has said magnatars like SGR 0501+4516 being created through accretion-induced collapse could also explain mysterious fast radio bursts which are sometimes picked up from deep space.
“Magnetar birth rates and formation scenarios are among the most pressing questions in high-energy astrophysics, with implications for many of the universe’s most powerful transient events, such as gamma-ray bursts, super-luminous supernovae, and fast radio bursts,” said Nanda Rea of the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona.
