News Release

Tremendous Gamma-Ray Flare Blasts Earth

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center News Center

An intense wave of gamma rays, emanating from a catastrophic magnetic flare on a mysterious star 20,000 light years away, struck the Earth's atmosphere on August 27, 1998, providing important clues about some of the most unusual stars in the Universe. Scientists said the gamma radiation posed no health risk to humans.

The wave hit the night side of the Earth and ionized (or knocked electrons out of) the atoms in the upper atmosphere to a level usually seen only during daytime. This astonishing blast of ionization was detected by Prof. Umran Inan of Stanford University. "It is extremely rare for an event occurring outside the solar system to have any measurable effect on the Earth," Inan said.

It was so powerful that it blasted sensitive detectors to maximum or off-scale on at least seven scientific spacecraft in Earth orbit and around the solar system.

The wave of radiation emanated from a newly discovered type of star called a magnetar. Magnetars are dense balls of super-heavy matter, no larger than a city but weighing more than the Sun. They have the greatest magnetic field known in the Universe, so intense that it powers a steady glow of X-rays from the star's surface, often punctuated by brief, intense gamma-ray flashes, and occasionally by cataclysmic flares like the one observed on August 27. Astronomers think that all these effects are caused by an out-of-control magnetic field -- a field capable of heating, mixing, and sometimes cracking the star's rigid surface to bits.

In June a team of scientists led by Dr. Chryssa Kouveliotou of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, used NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory to detect a series of about 50 flashes from the star, a type called a Soft Gamma Repeater (SGR), known as "SGR1900+14" in the constellation Aquila. During the flashing episode, Kouveliotou's team, in collaboration with Dr. Tod Strohmayer and his colleagues at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, pointed sensitive X-ray detectors aboard NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite toward the star. They found faint X-rays coming from the star, which pulsed regularly in intensity every 5.16 seconds.

These 5.16-second pulses already had been detected in April, when Dr. Kevin Hurley, University of California, Berkeley, aimed the Japanese/NASA Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics (ASCA) at the star. Comparisons of the ASCA and RXTE data showed that the X-ray pulses were gradually slowing down.

The finding implies that the Soft Gamma Repeater has a magnetic field about 800 trillion times stronger than Earth's magnetic field, and about 100 times stronger than any found anywhere in the Universe. Kouveliotou and her team had earlier found that another SGR was also a magnetar. This was exactly what Dr. Robert Duncan, University of Texas, Austin, and Dr. Christopher Thompson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, predicted in 1992 when they originated the "magnetar" theory.

Before the NASA team could announce these conclusions, SGR1900+14 emitted the tremendous flare of August 27, which was observed by almost every spacecraft with a high-energy radiation detector in space.

"Magnetars seem to answer several mysteries about the structure and evolution of stars," said Kouveliotou. "We think magnetars spend their first 10,000 years as Soft Gamma Repeaters. As they weaken with age and slow their rotation, they become Anomalous X-ray Pulsars -- stars that do not have enough 'juice' to flash anymore, but which emit a steady flow of X-rays for perhaps another 30,000 years. After that, they fade to black and drift for eternity through the heavens. The absence of observable pulsars in some supernova remnants just means that the pulsar's lights have gone out sooner than we expected."

A magnetar forms from the explosion, or supernova, of a very large, ordinary star. The star's heavy center collapses under its own gravity into a dense ball of super-compressed matter 12 miles across. This "neutron star" consists mostly of neutrons in a dense fluid, but the outer layers solidify into a rigid crust of atoms about 1 mile deep, with a surface of iron.

Even with this solid crust, a magnetar is incredibly unstable. Almost unimaginable magnetic fields, about 800 trillion times that of Earth's, cause the crust to crack and ripple in powerful starquakes. The energy released in these explosive starquakes streams out into space as intense flashes of gamma-rays. In the August 27 flare, pure magnetic energy was also released, as the star's entire crust was broken to bits.

"A magnet this strong could erase the magnetic strip on the credit cards in your wallet or pull the keys out of your pocket from a distance halfway to the Moon," said Duncan.

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Editor's Note: Additional information on magnetars or the Aug. 27 event is available on the internet at: http://www1.msfc.nasa.gov/NEWSROOM
http://www.magnetars.com

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