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Zombie Star is thought to have the greatest magnetic power. (Photo: Mashable)
JAKARTA – Astronomers have discovered a strange star in outer space. Because of its mystery, this star is called the Zombie Star and is thought to have the greatest magnetic power.
The star in the HD 45166 system is actually known as a Wolf-Rayet. Its emergence phase is rare and brief, causing it to burn hotter and produce a powerful gaseous wind just before exploding in a supernova.
The Zombie Star is only about four times the mass of the sun and not as bright as other stars in its class. It contains nitrogen, oxygen and carbon.
Astrophysicists Tomer Shenar and Julia Bodensteiner started calling it the Zombie Star due to Shenar’s obsession with solving its mysteries.
“The star is an enigma to me, and my colleagues must suffer because I mention this object over and over again,” said Shenar quoted from Mashable, Monday (21/8/2023).
The team concluded that the star’s specifications were odd because it was on the verge of becoming a magnetar, the most magnetic object in the universe. The star, located about 3,000 light years from Earth with a companion star in the constellation Monoceros, turned out to be the most magnetically massive living star ever found.
The new findings, published in the journal Science, present the Zombie Star as a new kind of astronomical object that could explain the origin of the discovery of stars. Zombi Star’s magnetic power was studied with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, which can detect and measure magnetic fields up to 43,000 gauss.
As a point of reference, the Earth’s magnetic field — the invisible force that helps compasses operate and birds navigate — is 0.5 gauss. “The entire surface of the Zombie Star has a magnetic field nearly 100,000 times stronger than Earth’s,” said lead author Pablo Marchant, an astronomer at the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy in Belgium, in a statement.
The team concluded that the star may be a strange ball and be the most magnetic object in the universe. The star, located about 3,000 light years from Earth with a companion star in the constellation Monoceros, turned out to be the most magnetically massive living star ever found.
(msf)
