Hall Attractor State: Neutron Star Magnetic Fields Are Not So Turbulent After All
Tuesday, May 6, 2014 - 15:30
in Astronomy & Space
Neutron stars are extraordinarily dense stellar bodies created when massive stars collapse. They host the strongest magnetic fields in the universe -- as much as a billion times more powerful than any man-made electromagnet. But some neutron stars are much more strongly magnetized than others and no one is sure why. A paper by McGill University physicists Konstantinos Gourgouliatos and Andrew Cumming in Physical Review Letters sheds new light on the expected geometry of the magnetic field in neutron stars and could help scientists measure the mass and radius of these unusual stellar bodies, and thereby gain insights into the physics of matter at extreme densities. read more