Astronomers witness the birth of a magnetar for the first time, a chirp in a superluminous supernova revealing a newborn neutron star spinning every 4.2 ms
For the first time, astronomers have watched a magnetar being born. A dying star gave off a repeating chirp in its light over 200 days, and that pattern exposed a newborn neutron star spinning every 4.2 milliseconds with a magnetic field near 300 trillion times Earth's. Per Natur
For the first time, astronomers have watched a magnetar come into existence. A magnetar is a neutron star with a magnetic field so intense it sits at the extreme edge of what physics allows, and until now their formation had only been inferred, never directly seen. The evidence came from a superluminous supernova that teams at the Las Cumbres Observatory and the ATLAS survey followed for more than 200 days. Instead of fading smoothly, the explosion pulsed, brightening and dimming in a repeating pattern that sped up over time, a rhythm researchers described as a chirp. That signature pointed to a newborn neutron star spinning roughly every 4.2 milliseconds on a tilted disk, with a magnetic field near 300 trillion times Earth's. The result, published in Nature, is the first time general relativity has been used to explain the inner workings of a supernova, and it links these newborn magnetars to some of the brightest stellar explosions ever recorded. It gives astronomers a direct look at an object they had only been able to theorize about.