All neutron stars have intense magnetic fields. The typical magnetic field of a neutron star is about 100,000 times stronger than the strongest magnetic fields we can create on Earth. But about 1% of neutron stars have even stronger magnetic fields. Known as magnetars, their magnetic fields can be 1,000 times stronger than a regular magnetic field. They are a likely cause of powerful transient events such as soft gamma-ray repeaters and fast radio bursts. A new study looks at how magnetars might form. The findings are published on the arXiv preprint server.<\/p>\n
The work focuses on the mergers of binary neutron stars. Often when two neutron stars collide, they form a black hole. This is because the combined mass of the two neutron stars is greater than the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff (TOV) limit, which is around 2.6 solar masses. Most neutron stars are more massive than white dwarfs, which have a Chandrasekhar limit of about 1.4 solar masses. But some neutron stars have smaller masses. If they happen to have a total mass less than the TOV limit, then they can merge and become a single neutron star.<\/p>\n
Using high-resolution simulations run on the Japanese supercomputer FUGAKU, the team looked at the merger of low-mass neutron star binaries. To simplify things a bit, they assumed stars with identical masses, but otherwise typical neutron stars. They assumed the magnetic field strengths of these stars were around 3 trillion gauss, which is in the upper range of typical neutron stars. Their simulations ran from just moments before the stars collide until just after.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
All neutron stars have intense magnetic fields. The typical magnetic field of a neutron star is about 100,000 times stronger than the strongest magnetic fields we can create on Earth. But about 1% of neutron stars have even stronger magnetic fields. Known as magnetars, their magnetic fields can be 1,000 times stronger than a regular [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-supercomputing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}