A magnetar is a neutron star with an extraordinarily powerful magnetic field, trillions of times stronger than Earth's and the most intense known in the universe. Stresses in that field can crack the star's crust, releasing sudden bursts of X-rays and gamma rays. Magnetars are now the leading suspects behind fast radio bursts, the millisecond flashes of radio energy seen from across the cosmos, after one inside our own galaxy was caught producing such a burst in 2020.
Signals & Anomalies · Magnetars · Radio Astronomy
A stellar corpse in the Scutum arm pulses in radio waves and X-rays every 44 minutes. It does not behave like a magnetar, a pulsar, or a white dwarf. ...
Astrophysics · Supernovae · Magnetars
A billion light-years away, one of the brightest explosions in the universe pulsed with a rhythm that kept speeding up. That accelerating beat, astron...
Signals & Anomalies · Radio Astronomy · Magnetars
For sixteen years, fast radio bursts arrived from nowhere and explained nothing. Then one of them came from inside our own galaxy, and the prime suspe...