Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) using the Swift X-ray satellite while in outburst (GCN circular 27373) discovered SwiftJ1818.0-1607.
NASA and the European Space Agency have discovered the youngest known magnetar to date. A suite of space-based telescopes they operate found this extreme, cosmic infant at just 240 years old. It could possibly help astronomers understand how these dead, dense stars come to be and how they evolve.
The Astrophysical Journal Letters researcher describes Swift J1818.0-1607, a young magnetar, first spotted by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. They found it on March 12 after it let out a mighty, explosive burst of X-rays.
Magnetars are a rare kind of neutron star which are made of the collapsed cores of huge stars with extreme magnetic fields. They pack a huge amount of mass into a tiny space, which generates a huge amount of weird physical phenomena. Their magnetic fields can be up to a thousand times stronger than your regular, run-of-the-mill, neutron star.
This particularly magnetar is only around 16,000 light-years from the Earth, practically in our backyard. And it is located in the constellation Sagittarius.
Astronomers have only detected a few dozen magnetars and none have ever been detected so soon after they have formed.
This object is revealing to us an earlier time in a magnetar’s life than we’ve ever seen before. This was a statement from Nanda Rea, an astronomer at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona. Rea, also a co-author of the study, said it shows how a magnetar is like very shortly after its formation.
NASA and the ESA Observe the Baby Magnetar
Astronomers followed-up Swift’s observations with the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton observatory, NASA’s NuSTAR telescope, and the ground-based Sardinia Radio Telescope. They did this to reveal more about this rare star’s features.
That helped pin down an age of 240 years. If further observations of the magnetar’s spin reinforce this hypothesis, then it will be the youngest ever magnetar found.
It is amazing that magnetars are quite diverse as a population. This was stated by Victoria Kaspi, an astronomer at McGill University in Montreal who was not involved with the study. They’re very strange and very rare and she said she doesn’t think we’ve seen the full range of possibilities.
Watching this young magnetar will help add to a growing body of research about the enigmatic and uncommon phenomena. Astronomers may be able to chart the changes that magnetars undergo as they move from infancy to adulthood. They may be able to study how aging affects their properties and emissions.
Magnetars are also one of the prime suspects in the mystery of fast radio bursts. They are brief radio signals that flare up to life and quickly disappear. Some have hypothesized that the extreme environments around such stars may be flinging these strange signals towards the Earth.
This extremely magnetic and incredible dense star could strangely be the ‘missing link’ between magnetars and pulsars. It is also one of the rarest and most mysterious stars in the galaxy.
Meanwhile, the flaring dead star is the fifth magnetar ever detected emitting a pulsed radio wave. But it’s also doing so in a manner unlike any of the other four. The Swift J1818.0-1607 behaves more like a radio pulsar than a radio magnetar.
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