The magnetic field is too strong to “freeze” the surface, and it is found that the magnetar may have a solid shell | TechNews Technology News

Stars are super-hot objects filled with plasma, but astronomers have now discovered a super-weird star that appears to have a solid surface: Its magnetic field is strong enough to “freeze” its outer layers into a solid shell.

Launched on December 9, 2021, NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) measures X-ray polarized light from cosmic sources to uncover information about objects and their surroundings.

An international team led by University College London, UK, used IXPE to observe a magnetar called 4U 0142+61 some 13,000 light-years from Earth, and the results have led to many unexpected discoveries.

Magnetars are a type of neutron stars with super-strong magnetic fields. They emit bright X-rays and show unstable activity cycles. With the eruption of flares, they can release millions of times more than the sun in a year in just 1 second. energy.

Scientists originally expected that there was an atmosphere around the magnetar, and X-rays passing through would be polarized in a specific direction. However, the IXPE observation found that the proportion of polarized light was much lower than expected, indicating that the magnetar lacks an outer atmosphere.

Even more bizarrely, higher-energy light particles flip the polarization angle by exactly 90 degrees compared to lower-energy photons, a signal that would be produced if a magnetar had a solid surface and was surrounded by a current-filled external magnetic field.

The finding was completely unexpected, and researchers believe that the star’s gas may have reached a critical temperature, where it is “frozen” into a solid by a strong magnetic field in a similar way that water turns to ice.

There may be other explanations for the observations, but this is the first time a plausible hypothesis exists for a star to have a solid surface. The researchers hope to observe more magnetars in the future to study how the interaction of temperature and magnetic field strength alters the star’s surface.

The new paper is published in the journal Science.

(Source of the first image: pixabay)

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