The surfaces of neutron stars have magnetic fields stronger than anything we know. But not all neutron stars are the same, and measuring these fields can be difficult, so we don’t really know exactly how high the magnetic field strengths can get. But now a new measurement has brought with it a new record.
In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, it was announced that a 1.6 billion Tesla magnetic field was discovered in the Swift J0243 system. This exceeds the 1 billion Tesla record set in 2020. This figure represents about 150 million times the magnet in the world’s most powerful MRI machine, or 300 billion times the magnets found in refrigerator mags.
To determine this value, Ling-Da Kong of the China Institute of High Energy Physics and colleagues used the Insight-HXMT space telescope to study the system’s X-ray spectrum, looking for cyclotron absorption lines during a powerful explosion the system experienced in 2017. The higher the energy of these lines, the stronger the field must be to produce them. In the measurements, the energy of the lines was determined as 146 keV.
Measurements show that the magnetic field of the star Swift J0243.6+6124 is complex and unsymmetrical. Swift J0243.6+6124 orbits its neighboring star every 28 days and absorbs matter from it.
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