The true nature of a star that has baffled astronomers for over 100 years is finally revealed.
HD 45166 is a dying Wolf-Rayet star about 3,000 light-years away. Like most stars of its class, it is rich in helium and has a companion. However, the object behaves in a special way that we haven’t seen in other Wolf-Rayet stars. The mass loss is greater than expected, and the winds have an unusual pattern Science alert.
Astronomer Tomer Schnar of the University of Amsterdam and his team have now discovered that this strange celestial body possesses an incredibly strong magnetic field, which indicates that when it reaches the end of its ‘life’, it turns into what is called a magnetic fire.
The discovery makes HD 45166 the first known Wolf-Rayet magnetar and solves previous problems with the binary, as well as fills in some gaps in our understanding of how massive stars become the most magnetic objects in the universe.
Wolf-Rayet stars are rare, but they can be among the most exciting stars in the Milky Way, as they use every drop of fusion fuel in their cores. It is very hot, very bright, contains very little hydrogen, but is rich in carbon and nitrogen.
Due to the solar wind, it also rapidly loses mass and becomes a supernova in a relatively short time. They launch their outer matter into space, and soon their core collapses into a neutron star. A super-dense object with a diameter of only 20 kilometers, weighing 2.4 times the mass of the Sun.
Magnetars are a type of neutron star, but with an incredible magnetic field about a thousand times stronger than a normal neutron star and four billion times stronger than Earth’s.
We don’t know yet how they will turn out like this. One possible way, according to the models, is if the star already had a magnetic field before the supernova exploded and the core collapsed. The problem with this is that so far no star has been discovered to have a strong enough magnetic field at the end of its life.
The search was done by Sciences It was published in the journal
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