The Magenetares They are among the strangest objects in the universe. The key characteristic of these neutron stars is their magnetism, but understanding the origin of this is not so simple.
Explaining magnetism. Now a new study He has revealed That the origin of the magnetism of some magnetares, the so-called “low intensity”, is found in a phenomenon we call Tayler-Spruit dynamo. The new job, explain those responsible, resolves a mystery emerged more than a decade ago.
Of low intensity. Magnetares are neutron stars, objects of great density that arise after the outbreak of some supernovae that give the death of large mass stars. These objects are characterized by their magnetic fields although, as we have discovered in recent years, these fields are not always comparable.
Low intensity magnetares objects have between one and 10 tera-gauss (between 0.1 and 1 giga-tesla), which is one or two orders of magnitude lower than what was used to be considered defining in the “classic” magnetars. Despite this low intensity, this type of magnetar produces x -ray emissions similar to conventional ones.
The important difference in the intensity of the magnetic fields of one and the other have led astronomers to press that the magnetism of each other has a different origin.
Simulating a star. To understand what was happening in low intensity magnetars to generate their peculaires magnetic fields, the team responsible for the new study He turned to a numerical simulation with which they modeled the magnetic-thermal evolution of these objects.
They observed a “dynamo process” (called Tayler-Spruit) that was given in the proto-strolle of neutrons, a process capable of generating low intensity fields from movement such as those observed in this type of stars.
Relapse. According to Explain the responsible teamthe key is in the birth of these neutron stars, in the explosions of the supernovas in which they originate. As the model shows, the great of the star expelled in the outbreak ends up falling back to the new neutron star, which makes this faster unleashing this dynamo of Tayler-Spruit
The details of the work were published In an article In the magazine Nature Astronomy.
Five of 30. Magnetars are objects on which we still have much to learn. To illustrate this a fact can be useful: to date we have only discovered about thirty of these objects in the immensity of the observable universe. Of these only five are what we call low intensity magnetars.
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Image | NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab