High energy outbursts in this type of neutron star — a magnetar — are thought to be caused by "starquakes."

1. 'Cosmic monster' star spits energy with
the force of a billion suns
High energy outbursts in this type of neutron star — a magnetar — are
thought to be caused by "starquakes."
A powerful X-ray burst erupts from a magnetar — a supermagnetized version of
a stellar remnant known as a neutron star — in this illustration. (Image credit:
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA))
A dense, magnetic star violently erupted and spat out as much energy as a billion
suns — and it happened in a fraction of a second, scientists recently reported.
This type of star, known as a magnetar, is a neutron star with an exceptionally
strong magnetic field, and magnetars often flare spectacularly and without
warning. But even though magnetars can be thousands of times brighter than our
sun, their eruptions are so brief and unpredictable that they're challenging for
astrophysicists to find and study.
However, researchers recently managed to catch one of these flares and calculate
oscillations in the brightness of a magnetar as it erupted. The scientists found that
the distant magnetar released as much energy as our sun produces in 100,000
years, and it did so in just 1/10 of a second, according to a statement translated
from Spanish.

2. A neutron star forms when a massive star collapses at the end of its life. As the
star dies in a supernova, protons and electrons in its core are crushed into a
compressed solar mass that combines intense gravity with high-speed rotation
and powerful magnetic forces, according to NASA. The result, a neutron star, is
approximately 1.3 to 2.5 solar masses — one solar mass is the mass of our sun,
or about 330,000 Earths — crammed into a sphere measuring just 12 miles (20
kilometers) in diameter.
Matter in neutron stars is so densely packed that an amount the size of a sugar
cube would weigh more than 1 billion tons (900 million metric tons), and a
neutron star's gravitational pull is so intense that a passing marshmallow would
hit the star's surface with the force of 1,000 hydrogen bombs, according to
NASA.
Magnetars are neutron stars with magnetic fields that are 1,000 times stronger
than those of other neutron stars, and they are more powerful than any other
magnetic object in the universe. Our sun pales in comparison to these bright,
dense stars even when they aren't erupting, study lead author Alberto J. Castro-
Tirado, a research professor with the Institute for Astrophysics of Andalucía at
the Spanish Research Council, said in the statement.
"Even in an inactive state, magnetars can be 100,000 times more luminous than
our sun," Castro-Tirado said. "But in the case of the flash that we have studied
— GRB2001415 — the energy that was released is equivalent to that which our
sun radiates in 100,000 years."
A "giant flare"
The magnetar that produced the brief eruption is located in the Sculptor Galaxy,
a spiral galaxy about 13 million light-years from Earth, and is "a true cosmic
monster," study co-author Victor Reglero, director of UV's Image Processing
Laboratory, said in the statement. The giant flare was detected on April 15, 2020
by the Atmosphere–Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) instrument on the
International Space Station, researchers reported Dec. 22 in the journal Nature.
Artificial intelligence (AI) in the ASIM pipeline detected the flare, enabling the
researchers to analyze that brief, violent energy surge; the flare lasted just 0.16
seconds and then the signal decayed so rapidly that it was nearly
indistinguishable from background noise in the data. The study authors spent
more than a year analyzing ASIM's two seconds of data collection, dividing the
event into four phases based on the magnetar's energy output, and then

3. measuring variations in the star's magnetic field caused by the energy pulse
when it was at its peak.
It's almost as if the magnetar decided to broadcast its existence "from its cosmic
solitude" by shouting into the void of space with the force "of a billion suns,"
Reglero said.
Only about 30 magnetars have been identified from approximately 3,000 known
neutron stars, and this is the most distant magnetar flare detected to date.
Scientists suspect that eruptions such as this one may be caused by so-called
starquakes that disrupt magnetars' elastic outer layers, and this rare observation
could help researchers unravel the stresses that produce magnetars' energy
burps, according to the study.
Our Milky Way Galaxy
(Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech)
How much do you know about the city you live in? Sure, you've got your favorite
restaurants and the best way to avoid traffic during rush hour, but it's unlikely
you know the details of every urban nook and cranny. The same goes for the
galaxy you live in, the Milky Way.
Our celestial home is an awe-inspiring place full of stars, supernovas, nebulas,
energy and dark matter, but many aspects of it remain mysterious, even to
scientists. For those seeking to better know their own place in the universe, here
are 11 enlightening facts about the Milky Way.

4. We're not sure exactly how many stars are in the Milky Way
(Image credit: Two Micron All-Sky Survey)
Counting stars is a tedious business. Even astronomers argue over the best way
to do it. Their telescopes see only the brightest stars in our galaxy, and many are
hidden by obscuring gas and dust. One technique to estimate the stellar
population of the Milky Way is to look at how fast stars are orbiting within it,
which gives an indication of the gravitational tug, and therefore the mass, of the
galaxy. Divide the galactic mass by the average size of a star and you should have
your answer. But as David Kornreich, an astronomer at Ithaca College in New
York, told Live Science's sister site Space.com, these numbers are all
approximations. Stars vary widely in size, and many assumptions go into
estimating the number of stars residing in the Milky Way. The European Space
Agency's Gaia satellite has mapped the location of 1 billion stars in our galaxy,
and its scientists believe this represents 1 percent of the total, so perhaps the
Milky Way contains about 100 billion stars. [Large Numbers That Define the
Universe].

5. Nobody knows how much the Milky Way weighs
On a related note, astronomers are still unsure exactly how much our galaxy
weighs, with estimates
ranging from 700 billion to
2 trillion times the mass of
our sun. Getting a better
grasp is no easy task. Most
of the Milky Way's mass —
perhaps 85 percent — is in
the form of dark matter,
which gives off no light and
so is impossible to directly
observe, according to
astronomer Ekta Patel of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her recent study
looked at how strongly our galaxy's humongous mass gravitationally tugs on
smaller galaxies orbiting it and updated the estimate of the Milky Way's mass to
960 billion times the mass of the sun, Live Science previously reported.
The Milky Way is probably in a big, empty spot in the universe
Several studies have
indicated that the Milky Way
and its neighbors are living
out in the boonies of the
cosmos. From afar, the large-
scale structure of the
universe looks like a colossal
cosmic web, with string-like
filaments connecting dense regions separated by enormous, mostly empty
voids. The emphasis in that last sentence should be on "mostly empty," since
our own galactic abode seems to be an inhabitant of the Keenan, Barger and
Cowie (KBC) Void, named after three astronomers who identified it in a 2013
study in The Astrophysical Journal. Last year, a separate team looked at the
motion of galaxies in the cosmic web to provide additional confirmation
that we're floating in one of the big, empty areas, Live Science previously
reported.

6. Astronomers are trying to photograph the monster black hole at the
Milky Way's center
(Image credit: NASA/CXC/Columbia Univ. /C. Hailey et al.)
Lurking in the heart of our galaxy is a hungry behemoth, a gigantic black hole
with the weight of 4 million suns. Scientists know that it's there because they
can trace the paths of stars in the Milky Way's center and see that they seem to
orbit a supermassive object that can't be seen. But in recent years, astronomers
have been combining observations from multiple radio telescopes to try and get
a glimpse of the environment surrounding the black hole, which is packed with
gas and dust spinning around the black hole's maw. The project, called the Event
Horizon Telescope, expects to have preliminary images of the black hole's edge
in the coming months, according to the team's blog. [Stephen Hawking's Most
Far-Out Ideas About Black Holes]

7. Small galaxies orbit the Milky Way and sometimes crash into it
(Image credit: Juan Carlos Muñoz/ESO)
When Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed through the Southern
Hemisphere in the 16th century, he and his crew were among the first
Europeans to report on circular clusters of stars in the night sky, according to
the European Southern Observatory. These clusters are actually small galaxies
that orbit our Milky Way like planets around a star, and they have been named
the Small and Large Magellanic clouds. Many such dwarf galaxies orbit ours —
and sometimes they get eaten by our massive Milky Way. Earlier this year,
astronomers used new data from the Gaia satellite that showed millions of stars
in our galaxy moving in similar narrow, "needle-like" orbits, suggesting they all
originated from an earlier dwarf galaxy dubbed "the Gaia Sausage," as Live
Science reported at the time.