NASA | JPL-Caltech | Swift | NuSTAR | 2020 Jun 17
Born from an exploded star, the infant magnetar belongs to a family of extreme objects called neutron stars. Its discovery may lend insight into these strange phenomena.
Astronomers tend to have a slightly different sense of time than the rest of us. They regularly study events that happened millions or billions of years ago, and objects that have been around for just as long. That's partly why the recently discovered neutron star known as Swift J1818.0−1607 is remarkable: A new study ... estimates that it is only about 240 years old — a veritable newborn by cosmic standards.
NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory spotted the young object on March 12, when it released a massive burst of X-rays. Follow-up studies by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory and NASA's NuSTAR telescope ... revealed more of the neutron star's physical characteristics, including those used to estimate its age. ...
Swift J1818.0−1607 packs twice the mass of our Sun into a volume more than one trillion times smaller.
With a magnetic field up to 1,000 times stronger than a typical neutron star — and about 100 million times stronger than the most powerful magnets made by humans — Swift J1818.0−1607 belongs to a special class of objects called magnetars, which are the most magnetic objects in the universe. And it appears to be the youngest magnetar ever discovered. If its age is confirmed, that means light from the stellar explosion that formed it would have reached Earth around the time that George Washington became the first president of the United States. ...
XMM-Newton Spies Youngest Baby Pulsar Ever Discovered
ESA | Space Science | Science & Technology | XMM-Newton | 2020 Jun 17
A Very Young Radio-Loud Magnetar ~ P. Esposito et al
- Astrophysical Journal Letters 896(2):L30 (2020 Jun 20) DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab9742
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:2004.04083 > 08 Apr 2020 (v1), 25 May 2020 (v2)