Astronomers have discovered a unique type of star that behaves in a strange way, about 15,000 light-years away, and has blown the radio wave in strange directions, apparently reversing its polarity.
The magnetar Swift J1818.0-1607, discovered in 2020, is one of only 30 other such objects detected in the Milky Way (so far). Swift is rare, even among these select few.
Magnetars are super-giant stars that cannot become supernovae and rather collapse into ultra-dense nuclei thanks to their own tremendous gravity. Unlike other types of neutron stars that form in a similar way, magnetars produce extremely powerful magnetic fields, hence the name.
After a series of new observations with the permission of scientists from the ARC Center of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), researchers found that Swift also emits radio waves, which behave more like a pulse, another offshoot of neutron stars that are powerful blow out beams. radiation from their poles, rather than a magnetar from the garden.
Over the course of eight observations over a period of five months during 2020, astronomers noticed that the radio pulses changed dramatically.
Swift behaved like a pulsar in May, exhibiting a kind of weak flicker in June and then displaying a mixture of pulsating and magnetarous pulses before finally settling into a more magnetarous state in August.
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This strange behavior has increasingly led researchers to suspect that Swift may be the missing link between magnets and pulsars that connects this dense and dysfunctional family of dead stars.
“This bizarre behavior has never been seen before in any radio-loud magnetar,” the lead author of the study, Marcus Lower of Swinburne University and CSIRO, said.
Now the researchers are proposing a possible new state of stellar evolution that has been seen by mankind so far, because they suspect that “The radio beam briefly flipped to a very different magnetic pole in the northern hemisphere of the magnetar.”
They now hope to confirm this hypothesis by direct observations of such a flip to prove once and for all whether these strange and crazy magnetars are indeed a new breed and whether Swift is an audacious outlier.
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