Latest Neutron star Stories

'Magnetar' Magnetic Field is 600 Trillion Times Stronger Than Earth'sUniversity of Arizona astronomers have pinpointed the origin of powerful bursts from nature's most magnetic objects.The bursts are from "magnetars," some of the most enigmatic objects in the universe.Magnetars are a type of neutron star, which are superdense stars that pack the mass of a sun into a body the size of Manhattan Island. Tiny magnetars possess magnetic fields that are at least 100 trillion times as...

Using NASA's Swift and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellites, astronomers have discovered one of the most bizarre planet-mass objects ever found.The object's minimum mass is only about 7 times the mass of Jupiter. But instead of orbiting a normal star, this low-mass body orbits a rapidly spinning pulsar. It orbits the pulsar every 54.7 minutes at an average distance of only about 230,000 miles (slightly less than the Earth-Moon distance)."This object is merely the skeleton of a...

Astronomers using XMM-Newton and Suzaku have seen Einstein's predicted distortion of space-time and pioneered a ground-breaking technique for determining the properties of neutron stars.ESA's XMM-Newton and the JAXA/NASA Suzaku X-ray observatories have been used to see the distortion of space-time around three neutron stars. These objects contain the densest observable matter in the Universe.Neutron stars cram more than a Sun's worth of material into a city-sized sphere. This means that a cup...

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has revealed an X-ray jet blasting away from a neutron star in a binary system. This discovery may help astronomers understand how neutron stars as well as black holes can generate powerful beams of relativistic particles. The jet was found in Circinus X-1, a system where a neutron star is in orbit around a star several times the mass of the Sun, about 20,000 light years from Earth. A neutron star is an extremely dense remnant of an exploded star consisting of...

Astronomers using data from several X-ray satellites have caught a magnetar "“ the remnant of a massive star with an incredibly strong magnetic field "“ in a sort of giant cosmic blench.When it comes to eerie astrophysical effects, the neutron stars commonly known as magnetars are hard to beat. The massive remnants of exploded stars, magnetars are the size of mountains but weigh as much as the sun, and have magnetic fields hundreds of trillions of times more powerful than the Earth's,...

Astronomers have found a new class of objects in space: a neutron star orbiting inside a cocoon of cold gas and/or dust that hides a bloated supergiant star. In a strange twist of fate, these objects may be tremendously luminous, but the enshrouding cocoon absorbs almost all their emission, making them nearly invisible to telescopes on Earth until now. These findings were presented on Feb. 5, 2007 by Dr. Sylvain Chaty of the University Paris 7 and Service d'Astrophysique, CEA, France, at the...

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have created a stunning new image of one of the youngest supernova remnants in the galaxy. This new view of the debris of an exploded star helps astronomers solve a long-standing mystery, with implications for understanding how a star's life can end catastrophically and for gauging the expansion of the universe. Over 400 years ago, sky watchers -- including the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler -- noticed a bright new object in the night sky....

Unusual Gamma-Ray Burst Studied in Detail Astronomers, using ESO's Very Large Telescope, have for the first time made the link between an X-ray flash and a supernova. Such flashes are the little siblings of gamma-ray bursts (GRB) and this discovery suggests the existence of a population of events less luminous than 'classical' GRBs, but possibly much more numerous. "This extends the GRB-supernova connection to X-ray flashes and fainter supernovae, implying a common origin," said...

A cosmic explosion seen last February may have been the "tip of an iceberg," showing that powerful, distant gamma ray bursts are outnumbered ten-to-one by less-energetic cousins, according to an international team of astronomers. A study of the explosion with X-ray and radio telescopes showed that it is "100 times less energetic than gamma ray bursts seen in the distant universe. We were able to see it because it's relatively nearby," said Alicia Soderberg, of Caltech,...

The super-sensitivity of ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has shown that the prevailing theory of how stellar corpses, known as pulsars, generate their X-rays needs revising. In particular, the energy needed to generate the million-degree polar hotspots seen on cooling neutron stars may come predominately from inside the pulsar, not from outside.Thirty-nine years ago, Cambridge astronomers Jocelyn Bell-Burnell and Anthony Hewish discovered the pulsars. These celestial objects are the...