Why Magnetars Should Freak You Out

Paul Sutter is a research fellow at the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste and a visiting scholar at The Ohio State University’s Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics. Sutter is also host of the podcasts “Ask a Spaceman” and “RealSpace,” and the YouTube series “Space In Your Face.” He contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

I’ll be honest: Magnetars freak me out. But to get to the “why,” I have to explain the “what.” Magnetars are a special kind of neutron star, and neutron stars are a special kind of dead star.

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> I’ll be honest: Magnetars freak me out.

Ditto.

> You know how atoms are made of a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons? Those charges respond to magnetic fields. Not very much under normal conditions, but this ain’t Kansas anymore, is it, Toto? Any unlucky atoms stretch into pencil-thin rods near these magnetars.

Even worse than that. The magnetic fields are so strong that they warp the vacuum of space itself. Normally in a quantum vacuum, particle-antiparticle pairs form and disappear in a time less than that given by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But these virtual particles interacting with the incomprehensibly strongt magnetar magnetic field change the vacuum of the universe. Scary.