"In a paper published today in the journal Nature, astrophysicists nailed down a superluminous supernova's true source: radiation beamed out from a city-sized, freshly formed, highly magnetized, fast-spinning ball of neutrons—a so-called magnetar. Besides solving the puzzle of superluminous supernovae, this also marks the first time scientists have witnessed a magnetar's birth."
"When such a star was some 10 to 25 times the mass of our sun, that remnant is usually a neutron star. These are the weirdest chunks of matter in the cosmos—a teaspoon of their material weighs as much as Mount Everest—making neutron stars the sites of some of the most extreme physics out there."
Superluminous supernovae, discovered in the early 2000s, are dramatically brighter and longer-lasting than normal supernovae, shining more than 10 times brighter. Scientists have now identified the source of these exceptional events: radiation from a magnetar, a city-sized neutron star with extreme magnetic fields and rapid rotation. When massive stars between 10 and 25 times the sun's mass exhaust their fuel, they collapse and explode, leaving behind a neutron star remnant. Under extreme conditions, these neutron stars become magnetars, pulsing out intense beams of radiation. This discovery represents the first witnessed birth of a magnetar and was enabled by unusual predictions from Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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