Astronomers witness the birth of a magnetar for the first time
For the first time, astronomers have directly observed a magnetar being born inside a superluminous supernova. A repeating chirp in the fading starlight, tracked for more than 200 days, revealed a newborn neutron star spinning every 4.2 milliseconds with a magnetic field roughly
Astronomers report the first direct observation of a magnetar forming, spotted inside the superluminous supernova SN 2024afav. Over more than 200 days of tracking its fading light, the team saw four brightness bumps with shrinking gaps, a pattern they call a chirp because it speeds up like the signal from colliding black holes. According to the study in Nature, the chirp is the signature of a rapidly spinning neutron star dragging a surrounding disk through space and time (Lense-Thirring precession). From the light's rhythm, researchers estimated a spin period of 4.2 milliseconds and a magnetic field about 300 trillion times stronger than Earth's, turning a long-suspected theory into a measurable observation. Astronomers expect the Vera Rubin Observatory to reveal dozens more such events. Sources: Nature, ScienceDaily, Live Science, Phys.org.