Magnetars Super Magnets in the Sky

Super fact 75 : Magnetars are a type of neutron star with extremely powerful magnetic fields ranging from 10,000,000,000,000 Gauss to 1,000,000,000,000,000 Gauss. In comparison, Earth’s magnetic field varied from about 0.25 to 0.65 Gauss at the surface. In other words, the magnetar magnetic fields are from 20 or 40 Trillion times to 2 or 4 Quadrillion times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field at the surface.

The magnetic fields of magnetars are trillions of times stronger than the sun’s magnetic field, which is 1 Gauss on a quiet sun surface and 2,000 to 4,000 Gauss in sunspots. The magnetic field of an MRI’s machine is also incredibly strong (2,000 Gauss to 100,000 Gauss). It is thousands to over a hundred thousand times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field. That’s why you should not have metals around an MRI machine. However, the magnetic field of a magnetar is still hundreds of millions to tens of billions of times stronger than the magnetic field of an MRI machine, and the magnetic field is not confined to a small machine but surrounds a neutron star and stretches far out into space.

If you placed a magnetar halfway to the moon from Earth (a magnetar is around 12 miles in diameter), it would erase all the credit cards on Earth (see video below). If you get close to a Magnetar (1000 kilometers) cars and other metal would float up in the air and the atoms in your body would stretch into rods making organic chemistry impossible and kill you. If you placed a steel beam on the surface of a magnetar the magnetic field would pulverize it and destroy the atoms. In 2004 a magnetar named SGR 1806-20 located 50,000 light years from our solar system (700 million times farther than the planet Jupiter) had a starquake disturbing the magnetic field and sending out a gamma burst that disrupted radio communication on Earth. I consider the existence of magnetars a super fact because the existence of these super magnetic monsters is shocking and not well known amongst the public, and yet their existence has been confirmed.

What Are Neutron Stars and Magnetars?

A neutron star is the gravitationally collapsed core of a massive supergiant star. The collapse causes it to become super compact and relatively small by volume. As the name implies the atoms are crushed, and protons and electrons merge into neutrons, making the neutron star mostly neutrons. The typical diameter of a neutron star ranges from 10 to 25 km (6 to 15 miles) depending on its mass. Neutron star material is extremely dense. A normal-sized matchbox containing neutron-star material would have a weight of approximately 3 billion tons, the same weight as a 0.5-cubic-kilometer chunk of the Earth (a cube with edges of about 800 meters) from Earth’s surface, or a very large mountain. In addition, the gravity on a neutron star is immense, about 100 billion to 200 billion times stronger than Earth’s gravity.

Magnetars are neutron stars with extremely powerful magnetic fields. They have the universe’s most powerful magnetic fields (trillions of times stronger than Earth’s) that power intense X-ray/gamma-ray bursts as its field decays, often seen as highly variable pulsars. They were first theorized in 1992 to explain Soft Gamma Repeaters (SGRs) and Anomalous X-ray Pulsars (AXPs). As of July 2021, 24 magnetars have been confirmed. According to the video below 30 magnetars have been confirmed in the Milky Way. There might be 3,000 in our Galaxy.

Magnetar YouTube Video

Other extreme stellar objects

• We are Star Dust
• The Bizarre Reality of Black Holes
• The Strange Worlds of Exoplanets
• The Enormous Kuiper belt
  • Quasar TON 618

I wish all of you Happy Holidays and Happy New Year

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