A Strange, Sleeping Magnetar Just Woke Up After a Decade of Silence

By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | March 15, 2019 06:50am ET

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Bursts of energy shoot from this artist's conception of a magnetar.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger


A particularly odd, spinning star has woken up, and it's spitting bright flashes of radio waves at us again.

The stellar spinner is a magnetar, which is a type of neutron star — a Manhattan-size remnant of a larger star, and the densest type of object besides black holes that we've detected anywhere in the universe.

This particular magnetar is called XTE J1810–197. It's one of only 23 magnetars and one of just four radio magnetars ever discovered, and it first turned up in 2004. Then, in late 2008, it went dormant and no longer emitted radio waves. On Dec. 8, 2018, it woke up again, and it's a bit changed. The researchers who spotted its awakening reported their finding in a paper uploaded March 6 to the preprint server arXiv.

Astronomers have long believed such magnetars carry magnetic fields more than a million times more intense than typical neutron stars and more than a quadrillion times more powerful than Earth's own. Those magnetic fields seem to be the source of intense flashes of electromagnetic energy we can detect from Earth as the magnetar spins. [7 Surprising Things About the Universe]

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