NASA Scientists Observed 240 Years Old Neutron Star After Current X-Ray Burst
Source : republicworld
NASA Scientists recently discovered the youngest neutron star, only about 240 years old, which newborn by cosmic standards.
As a NASA release, The “Infant Magnetar” was born from an exploded star a family of extreme cosmic objects called neutron stars. This neutron stars has been named as Swift J1818.0-1607 as per a recent study published about it in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
This star spotted by NASA Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory on 12 March, when it was spotted during a massive burst of X-rays. This 240 year old Infant Star has a magnetic field up to 1,000 times stronger than neutron star and about 100 million times stronger than the most powerful magnets made by humans.
European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton Observatory and NASA’s NuSTAR telescope did some follow up studies to decode the neutron star physical characteristics, including its age.
According to a SciTech Daily report, neutron stars are some of the densest objects in the universe, a neutron star material expected to weigh 4 billion tonnes on Earth. Atoms inside the neutron star are so tightly packed with each other that they behave in ways that are not observed in any other material, the report adds.
Swift J1818.0-1607 hastwice the mass of our Sun, packed into a volume that is over one trillion times smaller.
Speaking about the discovery, lead author Paolo Esposito of the University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia, Italy said that Swift J1818.0-1607 lies around 15,000 light years away, in the Milky Way galaxy.
“Spotting something so young, just after it formed in the Universe, is extremely exciting. People on Earth would have been able to see the supernova explosion that formed this baby magnetar around 240 years ago, right in the middle of the American and French revolutions” Esposito added in a statement released by the European Space Agency.
This means that the object is showing an earlier time in a magnetar’s life than ever seen before, the NASA release said.
Nanda Rea, a researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona and principal investigator added, “Maybe if we understand the formation story of these objects, we will understand why there is such a huge difference between the number of magnetars we have found and the total number of known neutron stars.”
Originally posted on June 18, 2020 @ 8:34 PM
