Discover the universe's most powerful magnet - Corriere della Sera

is a neutron star 6,500 light-years away

Discover the universe’s most powerful magnet

A magnetic field of a million billion times that of the Earth

Into It is the most powerful cosmic magnet ever discovered in the universe. It is a neutron star (the code name is SGR 0418 +5729) unearthed at 6,500 light years from Earth with the XMM-Newton satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) from a group of twelve astronomers belonging to Italian institutions ( University Institute of Higher Studies of Pavia-Iuss, National Institute of Astrophysics-INAF, University of Padua, National Institute of Nuclear Physics-INFN) and European (University College London, the French CEA, Institut de Ciencies de l’Espai Barcelona) .

The biggest cosmic magnet

magnetar – The neutron stars are characterized by strong magnetic fields have been named magnetar by astrophysicists Robert Duncan and Christopher

Thompson who have discovered over twenty years ago. Overall, if they know about twenty. “In the last decades the theory of magnetar has been confirmed by several observations, but none before, was able to directly measure the intensity of the magnetic field of these celestial objects,” says Andrea Tiengo, the Iuss of Pavia and of ‘ INAF, the first signatory of the result published by the British journal Nature . All the stars, when they end up burning their nuclear fuel shut off, but in a different way depending on their size. Those which have a mass 10 to 25 times greater than our Sun turn into neutron stars, that is their matter collapses and shrinks the size of arriving at just twenty kilometers in diameter.

EXPLOSION – It is precisely the magnetar with strong magnetic fields give rise to some powerful cosmic explosions recorded over time and can even disrupt terrestrial communications but takes place in places far away, thousands of light years. With the European satellite, astronomers were able to measure the frequency of the emitted X-rays. This is related to the frequency of the particles moving in the magnetic field, which in turn reveals the intensity of the magnetic field. The recorded value is huge, a trillion Gauss, when the Earth’s magnetic field is less than 1 Gauss. The understanding of such extreme events is important to decipher the mechanisms of explosive strange stars. On a smaller scale this is also on our sun, radiating streams of particles that hit the Earth causing some trouble sometimes. Among the signatories of the research there is also John F. Bignami, professor and chairman of the Iuss INAF.

Giovanni Caprara