The Secret of The Mysterious Magnetic Neutron Star

more images

The huge supernova that was expected to create a giant black hole, has created an extremely magnetic Neutron star. Scientists around the world are perplexed by the recent development. Astronomers around the world are currently trying to get to the bottom of this anomaly by using a Very Large Telescope (VLT).

According to classical astronomy, the star at the end of its life cycle is reduced to a giant mass. The mass falls prey to its very high gravity. For a medium sized star like the Sun, the end result is a white dwarf since the gravitational pull of those stars is not enough to form a Black Hole. The dwarf then generally decomposes to form the planetary nebula. For a larger star however, the gravitational pull will pull the protons and the neutrons of the mass. The Extreme gravity of the core would finally result in the creation of a field of infinite gravity.

A recent Fibre Large Array Multi Element Spectrograph study conducted by the European Southern Observatory in Chile, the existence of an extremely magnetic neutron star has been proved. Only thirteen such celestial bodies are known to exist. It is being speculated that the massive magnetic fields of such stars enable them to stay in existence even after tens of thousands of years. The extraordinary star is a part of the Westerlund 1.

The giant magnetic star defies all the conventions of Modern astronomy by its presence. According to the scientists the star has outlived its existence as the cluster is almost 3.5 million years old. The star with such a gigantic size at almost 40 solar masses was due to explode during the time frame. But in that case the end result should have been a Black hole and not a ‘magnetar’.

Astronomers propose that the star may have thrown off mass during its expansion before it became a supernova. And in a binary starsystem such as the Westerlund 1, a transfer of energy with a companion star during this phase was inevitable and as a result the star shrunk down to the 25 solar mass limit that was required to create a black hole.