This Object Would Tear the Atoms Out of Your Body. We Just Watched One Being Born.

#universe, #perfect universe, #galaxy #Mysteries

#Magnetar #NeutronStar #Supernova
There’s an object in our galaxy so magnetic that from about halfway to the Moon it would wipe every hard drive on Earth — and get within 1,000 kilometres of it and it would tear the atoms out of your body.

It’s called a magnetar, the most magnetic object in the known universe. For fifty years we’d only ever seen their flares. In 2026, astronomers finally watched one being born — and it took Einstein’s general relativity to explain how.

Key sources:

• Farah et al. (2026) — “Lense–Thirring precessing magnetar engine drives a superluminous supernova,” Nature (11 March 2026), DOI 10.1038/s41586-026-10151-0
• SN 2024afav, observed by the Las Cumbres Observatory global telescope network (Joseph Farah, Dan Kasen, Andy Howell, Alex Filippenko, Edo Berger)
• SGR 1806-20 giant flare, 27 December 2004 — disturbed Earth’s upper atmosphere from ~50,000 light-years away
• SGR 1935+2154 — first fast radio burst traced to a magnetar in our own galaxy (2020)
• Magnetars first proposed by Robert Duncan & Christopher Thompson (1992)

Chapters:

0:00 — A magnet that rewrites matter
0:29 — What a magnetar is
1:30 — The strongest field in the universe
2:41 — Starquakes and giant flares
4:06 — Caught being born
6:15 — Engines of the brightest explosions
8:07 — What we still don’t know
9:04 — The first breath

Images and sources:

NASA SVS, NASA/ESA, ESO, Las Cumbres Observatory, NASA/CSIRO