Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: Space Scoop: The Most Attractive Stars in the Universe
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : astrosphere.org ; http://unawe.org/kids/unawe1503/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
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Transcript:
This is 365 Days of Astronomy. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is…
The Most Attractive Stars in the Universe
Have you ever played with magnets? Of course you have! You’ve probably done the experiment where you lay a magnet on a table and place an iron nail nearby. If you push the magnet slowly toward the nail, there will come a point when the nail jumps across and sticks to the magnet.
That’s because magnets have something invisible that extends all around them, called a ‘magnetic field’. It can cause a pushing or pulling force on other objects, even if the magnet isn’t actually touching them.
The most powerful magnets in the Universe are called magnetars. These are tiny, super-compact stars, 50 times more massive than our Sun, squashed into a ball just 20 kilometers across. (That’s about the size of a small city!)
Astronomers think magnetars may be created when massive stars die in a supernova explosion. The star’s gases blow out into space creating a colorful cloud like the one in the picture in today’s album artwork, called Kes 73, which is 28,000 light years away from us. The supernova happened sometime between 750 and 2,100 years ago.
The Chandra Space Telescope provided the blue part of the image which is a result of X-rays. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s infrared imaging provided the orange part and the NRAO, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Jansky Very Large Array, the VLA radio telescope provided the red portion, while the Sloan Digital Sky Survey provided the visible white light image of the stars in that field of view.
At the same time as the star’s outer layers are being blown away, the core of the star collapses down to form a magnetar, a type of neutron star.
At the centre of the cosmic cloud in the album artwork lies a tiny magnetar. But what this star lacks in size it makes up for in energy, shooting out powerful jets of X-rays every few seconds!
Hey, Here’s a Cool Fact
Astronomers believe there could currently be more than 30 million magnetars dotted across the Milky Way!
Thank you for listening to 365 Days of Astronomy!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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