Word: magnetar
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...burst of electromagnetic energy smashed against the earth's atmosphere, ripping apart air molecules, disrupting radio communications and knocking a couple of satellites temporarily offline. The most likely source of the power surge, scientists announced last week: a starquake on a new kind of celestial object called a magnetar...
...magnetar is a star that has run out of fuel and collapsed to form a neutron star--a ball of matter just a dozen miles across, so dense that a teaspoonful weighs tens of millions of tons. In rare instances, a neutron star can generate a magnetic field strong enough to shatter the star's metallic surface, sending high-energy X rays and gamma rays blasting into space...
...rays and gamma rays recorded by orbiting observatories let astronomers know just how strong the magnetic field on this magnetar, dubbed SGR1900+14, is: about 800 trillion times as strong as the field that makes a compass work on Earth...
...Small and distant though it may be, this star is no ball of gas. It's a solid chunk of nuclear material known as a magnetar -- the existence of which has never been proved before. "These things were only predicted six years ago," says TIME senior science writer Michael Lemonick. "The predictions weren't taken seriously at first; it just didn't make sense." In fact, what physicists scoffed at turns out to be one of the most energetic objects in the universe -- a form of neutron star left over from a supernova, so tightly packed that its magnetic field...
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