Far out in the Milky Way, roughly 22,000 light years from Earth, a star unlike any other roars with a magnetic force that beats anything physicists have ever seen.
So it stands to reason that 1.6 billion Tesla is going to demand some truly mind-blowing physics. The kind only achievable by massive objects crammed into impossible volumes and spun at incredible speeds, fast enough to accelerate electrons to ridiculous velocities.worth paying attention to. A type of super-compact cosmic heavyweight known as a pulsar, it's the only X-ray source in our galaxy to fall into the ultra-luminous category.
Those features alone add up to a unique opportunity in our galactic backyard astronomers can't help but study in detail.Measuring the magnetic field of a far-distant object is easier said than done, though. As strong as they are, those fields quickly weaken to become undetectable over distances of thousands of light years.
Fortunately clues can be found in the way that the ultra-bright glow of X-rays scatters from the electrons whizzing down the magnetic racetrack, something known as a cyclotron resonance scattering feature. China's launch of the X-ray observatory Insight-HXMT in 2017 provides astrophysicists with a way to capture signatures like these in distant emissions, leading to the measure of electron energies in theFortunately, an outburst of activity in Swift J0243.6+6124 following Insight-HXMT's launch also provided a glimpse into its own high-strength magnetic field, with a cyclotron resonance scattering feature buried within its X-ray spectrum.
Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Sun Yat-Sen University in China, and the University of Tübingen in Germany, subsequently analyzed the feature to calculate the energy of its electrons to peak at an astonishing 146 kiloelectron volts, blitzing the 90 and 100 kiloelectron volts of the previous record holders.Given Swift J0243.
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