Astrophysics

    

Are the Extreme Fields of Magnetars Due to Gravitational Waves and Photon Decoupling

Authors: Rodney Bartlett

In our Milky Way galaxy's Westerlund 1 star cluster, there's a magnetar - neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field - whose progenitor was a star about 40 times the mass of the Sun. This behemoth should have collapsed to form a black hole, not a magnetar. The answer to this puzzle seems to lie with a companion star called Westerlund 1-5 that is now escaping the cluster. Mass was transferred from the magnetar progenitor to Westerlund 1-5, allowing its companion to shrink to a size that allowed a magnetar to be born instead of a black hole. (A study published in the May 2014 issue of "Astronomy & Astrophysics") The following preserves the necessity of a binary star system; going into detail which proposes why a magnetar, not a black hole, was born - and suggesting an answer as to why the magnetic field is so extreme.

Comments: 5 Pages. submitted to "Astronomy & Astrophysics"

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Submission history

[v1] 2014-08-27 09:43:48

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