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An international scientific group with outstanding Valencian participation has been able to measure for the first time the brightness of a magnetar during its most violent moments. The energy produced by the sun in 100,000 years was equivalent to what the magnetar released in 10th of a second. The artificial intelligence system developed at the IPL of the University of Valencia was used to carry out the observation.
Magnetars are objects that can hold a half-million times the mass of the Earth in a diameter of 20 kilometers. These objects, of which only 30 are known, have violent eruptions that are still little known due to their unexpected nature and their duration of just 10ths of a second. It is a challenge to detect them.
Scientists have wondered if there are high frequencies in the magnetars. The study of the eruption of a magnetar was published in the journal Nature. During violent moments, they measured the oscillations in the magnetar. These episodes are important for understanding giant magnetar eruptions. The work was done by six researchers from the University of Valencia.
The energy that was released from the flash that we studied is equivalent to the energy that our sun emits in 100,000 years.
Vctor Reglero, professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the UV, says that the explosion of the magnetar was discovered in the midst of the Pandemic. Since that time, we have developed very intense data analysis work, since it was a 10 16 Gauss neutron star and located in another galaxy. Reglero says that it's a true monster.
Scientists think that eruptions in magnetars may be due to instabilities in their magnetospheres or to a kind of "earthquake" produced in their crust, a rigid and elastic layer about a kilometer thick. The star's magnetosphere is well known in the sun, and which interact with each other, dissipating energy.
The emission produced by the interaction between the waves is consistent with the emission detected in the eruption. In a few milliseconds, the magnetic reconnection process, and also the pulse detected in GRB2001415, end, disappearing 3.5 milliseconds after the main burst. The analysis of the phenomenon made it possible to estimate the volume of the eruption, which was similar or even greater than the star itself.
The ASIM instrument is on the International Space Station. The main phase of the eruption was registered by only one of the seven telescopes. The scientific team was able to solve the temporal structure of the event, a truly complex task that involved more than a year of analysis for just two seconds.
The Atmosphere Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) was developed by the European Space Agency and has been operational in the International Space Station since the beginning of the year.
The telescope has been using 40 MeV to monitor violent phenomena in the Earth's atmosphere since June of last year. It has already detected a lot of eruptions. Vctor Reglero says that ASIM decides autonomously when something has happened and sends the data to the different centers of the Science Data Centre.
From a signal analysis point of view, detecting quasi-periodic oscillations in GRB2001415 was quite a challenge. The signal's short duration causes it to decay and become embedded in background noise. It is difficult to distinguish its signal as it is correlated noise. The researchers were able to detect this spectacular phenomenon thanks to the artificial intelligence system.
The most distant eruption of magnetars to date is located in the Sculptor group of galaxies and is 13 million light years away. It has been said that the magnetar wanted to indicate its existence to us from its solitude, singing in the kHz with the force of a Pavarotti of a billion suns.
The eruption provides a crucial component for understanding how magnetic stresses are produced in and around a neutron star. Continuous monitoring of magnetars in nearby galaxies will help to understand this phenomenon and pave the way to a better understanding of fast radio bursts, currently among the most enigmatic phenomena in astronomy.
The main peak of a magnetar giant flare has a very high-frequency oscillations. There is a DOI of 10.1038/s41586-021-04101-1.
Nature journal information.
There was a huge eruption of a neutron star on December 28, 2021.
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