Get ready to be amazed because scientists have just made an incredible discovery. Recently, a powerful burst of gamma radiation lasted only half a second but released an enormous amount of energy, more than what our sun could produce in 10 billion years! This phenomenal burst lit up the whole sky, and afterward, a much softer and long-lasting glow replaced it. Astronomers on Earth noticed a strange infrared signal, invisible to the human eye but could be perceived as heat. After examining the phenomenon using various waves, such as X-ray, radio, optical, and infrared, the astrophysics team made a shocking conclusion. It seemed that people had finally seen a newborn magnetar for the first time ever.
So, what is a magnetar? 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 gravity starts to squeeze inward. 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, producing 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.
But 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. However, when a star similar in size to our sun runs out of 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 a nova. It’s way less bright than a supernova or even a kilonova, which occurs when two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole merge into each other.
Now, here comes the most exciting part. If a star is 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.
And 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.
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