Scientists find rare, ultra-magnetic star

[Barb]

From a Wired blog -

Of the 400 billion stars in our galaxy, only 12 are magnetars -- neutron stars possessed of a magnetic field a quadrillion times stronger than Earth's.

Make that 13. In an article published last Friday in Nature, researchers at NASA's Spitzer Science Space Center describe a newly-found magnetar called SGR 1900+14.

How big is a quadrillion, you ask? It's a million times a billion. As in, 1,000,000,000,000,000. Apply it to magnetic fields, and -- in the well-chosen words of this press release -- you get "extreme fields [that] stretch the very fabric of matter, contorting atoms into thin cigar-shaped structures."

Under that stress, the star's very crust can split open, temporarily releasing "over a thousand times more energy than all of the stars in a galaxy." That appears to have happened around SGR 1900+14; the break in the interstellar dust ring surrounding the star was likely caused by the flare shooting into space.

All I can add to this is: Wow. And can't astronomers give it a cooler name? SGR 1900+14 seems terribly sterile, given the rareness of magnetars and the fact that they're just about the most literally powerful phenomena I've ever heard described. With all due sensitivity to religiously and secularly delicate readers, "Wrath of God" would do the trick.

 

[Ugozima]

Wow. Couldn't you eventually have an "ice-nine" effect with these things if there were enough?

 

[ShinyFlareon]

Man, if only we could find a way to harness the power of one of these things...we could kiss any and all energy problems goodbye forever -- or at least for a DAMN long time.