From NASA Swift: “NASA’s Swift Reveals New Phenomenon in a Neutron Star”

“Astronomers using NASA’s Swift X-ray Telescope have observed a spinning neutron star suddenly slowing down, yielding clues they can use to understand these extremely dense objects.

An artist’s rendering of an outburst on an ultra-magnetic neutron star, also called a magnetar.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

A neutron star is the crushed core of a massive star that ran out of fuel, collapsed under its own weight, and exploded as a supernova. A neutron star can spin as fast as 43,000 times per minute and boast a magnetic field a trillion times stronger than Earth’s. Matter within a neutron star is so dense a teaspoonful would weigh about a billion tons on Earth.

Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton/M. Sasaki et a

The magnetar 1E 2259+586 shines a brilliant blue-white in this false-color X-ray image of the CTB 109 supernova remnant, which lies about 10,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia. CTB 109 is only one of three supernova remnants in our galaxy known to harbor a magnetar. X-rays at low, medium and high energies are respectively shown in red, green, and blue in this image created from observations acquired by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton satellite in 2002.

See the full article here.

Swift is a first-of-its-kind multi-wavelength observatory dedicated to the study of gamma-ray burst (GRB) science. Its three instruments will work together to observe GRBs and afterglows in the gamma ray, X-ray, ultraviolet, and optical wavebands. The main mission objectives for Swift are to:

Determine the origin of gamma-ray bursts
Classify gamma-ray bursts and search for new types
Determine how the blastwave evolves and interacts with the surroundings
Use gamma-ray bursts to study the early universe
Perform the first sensitive hard X-ray survey of the sky

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