A 'zombie star' that could rip the humans apart is shooting through the Milky Way very soon
Image credits: X/@Hispaniceng
Astronomers have discovered an immensely powerful "
zombie star
" speeding through the
Milky Way
galaxy at an alarming speed of 110,000 mph. While asteroids, meteors and stars are known to move through the galaxy at high speeds often, what is concerning about this 'zombie star' is the fact that it has a magnetic field capable of ripping humans apart atom by atom.
Zombie star is a magnetar
Termed as SGR 0501+4516, is a
magnetar
, a
neutron star
with a commanding magnetic field. Neutron stars are the remains of dead stars that have collapsed into the size of small planets but retain mass that is equal to the sunlike stars. This makes them the densest cosmic objects in space after the black holes.
When was the zombie star discovered?
Image credits: X/@konstructivizm
The zombie star is one of the only 30 magnetars in the Milky Way galaxy and was discovered back in 2008. Back then it was around 15,000 light years away from the planet.
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However, in a new
study
published on April 15th in Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers analysed the subsequent sightings of SGR 0501+4516 to find that it is moving through the galaxy at a much faster speed than expected.
Could the zombie star wipe out humans?
According to experts, the SGR 0501+4516's magnetic field is around 100 trillion times more powerful than Earth's protective shield. If it "flew by Earth at half the Moon's distance, its intense [magnetic] field would wipe out every credit card on our planet," wrote
NASA
in a statement.
"If a human got within 600 miles, the magnetar would become a proverbial sci-fi death-ray, ripping apart every atom inside the body" the statement continued.
Discoveries about magnetars
Until now, researchers assumed that magnetars were formed by the explosion of dying stars that are later reforged into neutron stars. However, the research around SGR 0501+4516 showed that it's moving too fast and in the wrong direction to have originated from this method. "Tracing the magnetar's trajectory thousands of years into the past showed that there were no other supernova remnants or massive star clusters with which it could be associated," added representatives from NASA.
Thus, researchers believe that it was formed after the direct collapse of a white dwarf, which is the leftover core of a star after it has exhausted its fuel. "Normally, the [supernova] scenario leads to the ignition of nuclear reactions, and the white dwarf exploding, leaving nothing behind," study co-author Andrew Levan, an astronomer at Radboud University in the Netherlands and the University of Warwick in England, said in the statement. "But it has been theorized that under certain conditions, the white dwarf can instead collapse into a neutron star. We think this might be how [this magnetar] was born."
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