Ghostly Ring Found Circling Dead Star 207
Roland Piquepaille writes "An international team of scientists has found a strange ring around a dead star by using images taken by NASA's Spitzer space telescope. This star, called SGR 1900+14, belongs to a class of objects known as magnetars. According to NASA, a magnetar is 'a highly magnetized neutron star and the remnant of a brilliant supernova explosion signaling the death throes of a massive star.' So far, about a dozen magnetars have been found. An amazing thing about these stellar objects is their magnetic field. One of the researchers said that 'magnetars possess magnetic fields a million billion times stronger than the magnetic field of the Earth.'
Pssst! (Score:5, Informative)
I'd be pretty excited about studying these things, were I a physical scientist. When you get some massively powerful EMF, electrons and protons must have very "interesting" behavior.
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Had to look that up because it sounded nuts. However, looks like you're sort of right, other than for the fact that UK has abandoned the long scale in favour of the short. So a quadrillion there is now a thousand trillion as well, rather than a 'billiard'.
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The magnetic field of a magnetar would be lethal even at a distance of 1000 km, tearing tissues due to the diamagnetism of water.
Since magnetars rotate, I would guess that a person would probably be vaporized before being torn apart since you'd be travelling through magnetic flux fields. Such powerful fields have unusual effects on matter...
X-ray photons readily split in two or merge together. The vacuum itself is polarized, becoming strongly birefringent, like a calcite crystal. Atoms are deformed into long cylinders thinner than the quantum-relativistic wavelength of an electron.
In a field of about 105 teslas atomic orbitals deform into cigar shapes. At 1010 teslas, a hydrogen atom becomes a spindle 200 times narrower than its normal diameter.
I think the most powerful field ever generated in a lab was less than 200 tesla.
Re:Pssst! (Score:3, Informative)
small iron magnet 100 Gauss
small neodymium magnet 2,000 Gauss
big electromagnet 15,000 Gauss
Current FDA safety limit 80,000 Gauss (as of 2003)
World's most powerful MRI 94,000 Gauss (Uni of Illinois, makes the sodium ions flip instead of the water molecules. In testing, subjects noted odd sensations while being moved into the field, but once stationary the effects went away)
surface of a neutron star 10^12G (1,000,000,000,000 Gauss)
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In contrast, the 10^11T field of a magnetar would tear you to pieces even several thousand km away, and then tear those pieces into smaller, grotesquely elongated pieces, as the field strength is enough to distort the geometries of atomic orbitals. What would of course actually kill you on your way to a magnetar are the X-rays and gamma rays the thing throws out, and these forms of radiation should be considered among the effects of a cosmically strong magnetic field. However, assuming you could survive those, the magnetic field itself would still instantly kill you. A particular problem is that your body is made up of many different kinds of atoms and molecules, which will be affected by the intense field differently depending on whether they are ions, have a dipole moment, etc., so that you will in a literal sense be disintegrated.
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We can't. Copying and pasting from Wikipedia loses the superscript: that was 10^5 Tesla. Ten thousand Tesla. Way beyond our current capabilities :-)