There's a Tiny, Bright Magnetar Photobombing Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole

[Judi Lynn]

By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | April 17, 2019 04:13pm ET

- click for image -

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There's a Tiny, Bright Magnetar Photobombing Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole
An image from Chandra shows how the magnetar suddenly lit up in front of the black hole in 2013.
Credit: Chandra X-Ray Observatory

There's a bright magnetar photobombing the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, frustrating astronomers' efforts to study the black hole — called Sagittarius A* — using X-ray telescopes.

SagA* is the nearest known supermassive black hole to Earth. And while it's far smaller, quieter and dimmer than the recently imaged black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, it still represents one of the best opportunities astronomers have for understanding how black holes behave and interact with their surrounding environments. But back in 2013, a magnetar — an ultradense star (also called a neutron star) wrapped in powerful magnetic fields — between SagA* and Earth lit up, and ever since has been messing with efforts to observe the black hole using X-ray telescopes.

"We think of this as maybe a shattering of the neutron star surface, or some really violent event on the neutron star that causes it to get very, very bright and then fade slowly over time," said Daryl Haggard, a physicist at McGill University in Montreal who studies SagA* and the galactic center. [3 Huge Questions the Black Hole Image Didn't Answer]

Magnetars are tiny objects, part of a class of stars often comparable in size to Manhattan island. Before the little star lit up, it didn't give any sign that it was even there.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/65259-black-hole-photobomb.html?utm_source=notification

[rurallib]

1. nice to read a little science as a break from Trump/Barr today

Thanks for the break.

Reading about space is always so humbling giving perspective of how small we are in the universe.