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The universe is full of weird, scary, awesome, and interesting things.
I've made several videos already on topics like black holes, the size of the universe, and interstellar travel, which you can watch later.
But neutron stars and their even weirder twins called magnetars,
Are possibly even weirder, scarier, and more interesting than anything else I've discussed so far.
First, the basics.
Neutron stars and magnetars are the same objects with one major difference.
And they are born the same way
From the death of a large star somewhere between 10-29x the mass of our Sun.
When a star of this enormous size dies, after fusion in its core is no longer possible, the result is a brilliant supernova explosion.
The core of the star, no longer supported by the outward pressure generated by fusion, rapidly collapses from the enormous inward pressure of gravity.
Electrons and protons are forced so close together that they fuse to become neutrons, resulting in an unimaginably dense ball made
made almost entirely of neutrons with the mass of 1 to 2 Suns, that is only 20km across. Which is like crushing 2 entire suns down to the size of Manhattan.
They're so densely packed together that just a thimble full of neutron star material would have the mass of 100 million tons.
Which is roughly the same as 15 Great Pyramids of Giza or 70 million Toyota Corollas all condensed into a space the size of a thimble.
Neutron stars also rotate incredibly quickly after they're formed, and the quickest one ever yet to discovered is called PSR J1748-2446AD
Which rotates 716 times every second or about 24% of the speed of light at the surface.
While all of this sounds pretty extreme already,
A small percentage of neutron stars are born as even more extreme objects called magnetars.
All neutron stars have incredibly powerful magnetic fields.
Usually 2 trillion times more powerful than the magnetic field that you're currently experiencing on the Earth's surface.
But magnetars have a magnetic field 1000 times more powerful than even that is. This makes magnetars the most powerful magnets in the known universe
And weird things begin to happen if you get too close to one...
Remembering that these objects are only the size of Manhattan,
if one was a distance of 160 000 km away, the magnetic field
would be powerful enough to strip all the information of all the credit cards on Earth.
If you personally got too close to a magnetar,
very bad things would happen.
If you somehow got to within 1000 km of a magnetar
The magnetic field would be so strong
that it would begin to warped your entire body down at the atomic level.
Your very atoms will begin to get stretched into very thin rod-like shapes
which would render normal molecular chemistry impossible.
And your body would have essentially be dissolve and torn apart
down to the atomic level
as the atoms that make up your body would be transformed.
Magnetars can also be prone to a phenomenon known as starquakes
which are just like earthquakes but on a star.
The crust of a magnetar made out of neutrons
can crack just like tectonic plates do here on Earth.
These cracks are likely only micrometers long.
But when they happen,
the magnetar releases a truly gargantuan blast of radiation
that we can observe from the other side of the galaxy.
The most powerful of these starquakes ever observed
was from a magentar called SGR 1806-20,
about 50 000 light years away from us.
In 2004, the radiation from the explosion caused by this starquake reached earth.
And it was the brightest event that originated outside of the Solar System
known to have ever been witnessed by humans.
It is believed to also be the largest explosion observed in our galaxy
since the 1604 Supernova that was observed by Johannes Kepler.
In just 1/10 of a second, this starquake released more energy than the Sun
has released in the past 100 000 years.
The effects on Earth were very minor.
But if this had happened to a magnetar that was 10 light years away from us instead,
the effects would be far more severe.
It would be enough to totally destroy the Earth's ozone layer.
And also destroy most of the planet surface.
Life on Earth would almost be totally destroyed.
And we would not know that it was coming until it hit us
Luckily for us however, the closest discovered magnetar to Earth is 9 000 light years away.
As scary as magnetars are, we can thankfully remain more fascinated by them instead at a save distance away.
For now.... (Dun dun dun!)
If you still have questions that you like answered about neutron stars, how stars die
Or anything else about our strange and beautiful universe
Then you should know that this video was directly based off a section
in the astronomy course offered at Brilliant.org
Brilliant is an online learning platform where you can learn about math and science in an easily approachable way
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I have been spending a lot of time going through their astronomy course lately
And they have a section that is completely devoted to the life cycle of stars that inspired the creation of this video.
They teach you how to calculate what the mass of a teaspoon of neutron star material would be
And how neutron stars, white dwarfs and black holes are created in the first place.
The math in this course and the math behind the facts in the video that you just watched are the same.
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