Astronomers have discovered a unique kind of star that behaves strangely about 15,000 light-years away, blowing its radio wave in strange directions and appears to have reversed polarity.
The magnetar Swift J1818.0–1607, discovered in 2020, is one of only 30 other such objects detected (so far) in the Milky Way. Swift is rare even in this select group.
Magnetars are supergiants that don’t go supernova and instead collapse into ultra-dense cores thanks to their own immense gravity. Unlike other types of neutron stars that form in the same way, magnetars produce extremely powerful magnetic fields, hence the name.
After a slew of new observations courtesy of the scientists at the ARC Center of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), researchers found that Swift also emits radio waves and acts more like a pulsar, another offshoot of neutron stars, which produces powerful radiate rays. from radiation from their poles, instead of a magnetar from the garden.
Over the course of eight observations over a five-month period in 2020, astronomers noticed that the radio pulses changed dramatically.
Swift behaved like a pulsar in May, showing some sort of faint flicker in June, and then showing a mix of pulsar-like and magnetar-like pulses in July before finally settling to a more magnetar-like state in August.
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This strange behavior has led researchers to increasingly suspect that Swift is the missing link between magnetars and pulsars connecting this dense and dysfunctional family of dead stars.
“This bizarre behavior has never been seen in another radio-loud magnetar,” The study’s lead author, Marcus Lower of Swinburne University and CSIRO, said.
Now the researchers are proposing a possible new state of stellar evolution hitherto unseen by humanity, on suspicion that “The beam flipped briefly to a totally different magnetic pole in the northern hemisphere of the magnetar.”
They now hope to corroborate this hypothesis through direct observations of such a turnaround to prove once and for all whether these weird and crazy magnetars are indeed a new breed or whether Swift is a daring outlier.
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