Brandon is the space/physics editor at Live Science. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, CBS.com, the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and other outlets. He holds a bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona, with minors in journalism and media arts.
Stars could be sliced in half by"relativistic blades," or ultra-powerful outflows of plasma shaped by extremely strong magnetic fields, a wild new study suggests. And these star-splitting blades could explain some of the brightest explosions in the universe.
The researchers were hunting for the origins of certain types of gamma-ray bursts . GRBs are some of the most powerful explosions in the sky, but they typically occur so far away we can only see them as a brief but intense blip of excess gamma-ray radiation.
But the authors of the new study realized that the magnetar's magnetic fields can also beam intense bursts of radiation along the magnetar's equator. Shaped by the extreme centrifugal forces of the rotating star, these beams of radiation form a blade that moves outward through the star at nearly the speed of light, carrying more energy than a supernova explosion.
The blade then travels for a distance well over several times the radius of the original star before it finally loses steam, potentially explaining some longer-lasting GRBs.
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