A Star That Could Rip Our Planet Apart Was Just Born

it happened long long ago and far far away from our planet all the way across the universe a powerful burst of gamma radiation lasted a mere half second but it released an enormous amount of energy it was more than our sun would produce in 10 billion years this brief flash lit up the whole sky afterward a much softer and more long-lasting glow replaced it watching this fading light astronomers on earth noticed a strange infrared signal it was invisible to the human eye but could be perceived as heat after examining the phenomenon with x-ray radio optical and infrared waves the astrophysics team made a shocking conclusion it seemed that people had finally seen a newborn magnetar for the first time ever this magnetar was likely formed after two neutron stars had merged it resulted in a kilanova one of the brightest and largest stellar blasts its light finally reached our planet on may 22nd 2020. but i'm getting ahead of myself how about we first figure out what these novas magnetars and neutron stars are imagine a massive star at least five times the mass of our sun reaching the end of its life it might be because it's run out of nuclear fuel if it happens the star starts to cool off the pressure inside drops and the gravity starts to squeeze inward and then more than a million times the mass of our planet collapses within 15 seconds it happens so fast that an enormous shock wave causes the outer part of the star to blow up it produces a blinding burst of light this powerful blast is called a supernova what's left behind is an incredibly dense core with a huge cloud of hot gas called a nebula expanding around it if the star has been massive enough more than 10 times the size of the sun it's likely to turn into a black hole by the way when a star similar in size to our sun runs out of its fuel it turns into a white dwarf it expels most of its outer material and only the star's hot core remains intact such a core usually gets heated up to 180 000 degrees fahrenheit a white dwarf is just a bit bigger than our planet but half as massive as the sun in other words these stars are some of the densest objects in the universe a white dwarf can be 200 000 times denser than the earth it usually takes a white dwarf over a billion years to cool down under certain conditions such a star can erupt and this event is called anova it's way less bright than a supernova or even a kilanova which occurs when two neutron stars or a neutron star in a black hole merge into each other anyway back to a supernova if a star's large but not massive enough to turn into a black hole it turns into a neutron star it's basically a giant nucleus the central part of an atom these stars are mostly made up of neutrons and are rarely larger than 20 miles across for comparison our sun is almost 865 000 miles across which is 109 earths put side to side but don't let this relatively tiny size fool you any neutron star is at least one and a half times heavier than our sun and has an intense magnetic field if you scooped just a teaspoon of this star's insides this matter would weigh more than a billion tons that's so dense that it makes neutron stars some of the most extreme objects people know about the next stop is the black hole itself when two neutron stars merge they most often create a new much heavier one within milliseconds or even less this star collapses into a black hole but the astronomers who examined the flash of light recorded in march think there might be another outcome they're almost sure they saw something never observed before the birth of a magnetar that's an exotic form of a neutron star with an ultra strong magnetic field it's 1 000 trillion times stronger than our planets this field is also so powerful it heats the star's surface up to 18 million degrees fahrenheit neutron stars are weird and scary their interior is a never ending dance of particles in extreme conditions it results in unexpected and odd structures for example closer to the surface hundreds of neutrons form blobs those are not unlike some weird kind of space gnocchi they mold into long chains once you go deeper not that you'd ever be able to explore a neutron star from up close these long chains look like a layer of spaghetti underneath there's a region of even more extreme pressures that's where our spaghetti turns into lasagna sheets since we've started on this pasta comparison finally under all these layers even lasagna loses its form and becomes a shapeless mass but even in this mass there are some tube shaped gaps and don't they look like ziti another thing about neutron stars they're spinning non-stop and this spinning is fast more than several hundred times per second the fastest spinning neutron star makes more than 700 turns per second that's 42 000 times per minute neutron stars also have incredibly strong magnetic fields that's why if there was life on a neutron star it would be two-dimensional the star's gravity is so powerful it literally flattened anything on its surface and if such a star had an atmosphere it wouldn't spread up further than a foot or so above the surface but if neutron stars are bizarre and spooky magnetars are too perhaps even more so thanks to their incredible magnetic pull these stars would win in the strongest magnetic field competition hands down to put it simply magnetars are the most powerful magnets in the universe their magnetic fields can seriously mess with the neighborhood atoms unlucky enough to get close to such a star get stretched into pencil-thin lines if you somehow found yourself several hundred miles away from a magnetar it would end badly for you [Music] the magnetic field would first disrupt your bioelectricity it means that your nerve impulses wouldn't work anymore but that's not all even your molecules would change under the influence of the star's field in the end you'd kind of vanish if a magnetar flew within 100 000 miles from our planet it'd wipe out the data on every single credit card in the world astronomers have seen magnetars before but they've never witnessed one getting born after the light was first detected scientists understood something didn't add up they compared different kinds of observations it turned out that the light spotted by the hubble space telescope was 10 times brighter than predicted this information made the scientists think outside the box they realized an entirely new phenomenon was going on the team had several ideas that could explain the bizarre brightness but the most probable one was also the most eccentric before scientists thought magnetars only appeared after massive stars exploded and left behind super magnetized neutron stars but now they suppose a small number of magnetars may actually appear in a more peaceful way after two neutron stars merge scientists only know about no more than 10 magnetars in our home milky way galaxy they don't know for sure what makes these stars so terrifyingly magnetic whatever it is magnetars don't seem to last long after 10 000 years or so they return to a more familiar neutron star state they're still extremely magnetic super dense but not so extreme the closest magnetar people know about is 9 000 light years away from earth in the constellation karina astronomers think the original star was 30 to 40 times the mass of the sun which is a really big one another magnetar is 18 000 light years away from our planet it suddenly started to burst in 2002 around 80 bursts were recorded within a four hour window after that the magnetar has never been active again by the way the researchers were also immensely excited about seeing a kilanova it occurred when the two neutron stars supposedly merged a kilanova is more than one thousand times brighter than a typical nova before astronomers had only one confirmed and examined event of the kind but the kilonova recorded in march looked different and it might allow scientists to explore the diversity they knew nothing about

Channel: BRIGHT SIDE

Views: 1,134,580

Rating: 4.888689 out of 5

Keywords: white dwarf, neutron star facts, facts about space, magnetar, recent discoveries, magnetic field, dark matter, supernova, neutron star collision, neutron star black hole difference, bright side, neutron star explosion, neutron star formation, neutron star vs earth, neutron star explained, neutron star birth, black holes, neutron stars colliding, black hole size, brightside, dark energy, facts about the universe, kilonova, hubble space telescope, neutron star and black hole

Id: SxCS4EFNkwk

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020