Researchers are observing the strange behavior of a “dead” star

Studying this cosmic body will help scientists better understand neutron stars.

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Scientists were surprised by the behavior of one of the neutron stars, which was previously considered dead. An inactive celestial body suddenly began to emit a large number of radio waves.

The activity of this cosmic body does not correspond to the existing ideas about the behavior typical for this type of objects, reported on Space.com.

Neuron stars are cosmic objects consisting almost entirely of neutrons (particles without an electric charge), informs European Space Agency.

Most scientists are leaning to the fact that neutron stars are formed as a result of explosions of massive stars. These stellar “corpses” are so dense that, having the size of a sugar cube, they weigh the same as the Earth.

In turn, magnetars are one of the types of neuron stars. They got their name from the extremely strong magnetic field, which is about 100,000 million Tesla, which is a thousand times greater than that of an ordinary neutron star.

Research, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, witnessed the appearance of radio signals from the closest magnetar to Earth, XTE J1810-197, located almost 8000 light years from the planet. This amount of radio waves is not typical for dead stars.

“Unlike the radio signals we’ve seen from other magnetars, this one emits an enormous amount of rapidly changing circular polarization. We’ve never seen anything like it before.”, – said in a statement the head of the group and a scientist of the State Association of Scientific and Applied Research (CSIRO) Marcus Lower.

According to the scientists, radio emission from the star XTE J1810-197 was first recorded in 2003, but then this magnetar was inactive for more than a decade.

In 2018, the mentioned cosmic body was active again, which was recorded by the 76-meter Lovell telescope of the University of Manchester. This was repeated in the observation of Murriyang, located in Australia.

Scientists suggest that the cause of the atypical behavior was the superheated plasma above the magnetic field of XTE J1810-197.

“Exactly how plasma does this remains to be determined,” – reported Marcus Lower.

The researchers hope that continued observations of XTE J1810-197 with the telescope will help to understand other unusual phenomena associated with magnetars.

We used to wroteabout the Hubble telescope, which for three years explored stars in ultraviolet light.