Magnetars Footage Review — Opening, Scenes 1-7
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Scene 1 — Sub 1 (0:00–0:12)
Tonight, we travel to a dead star. It is not large. If you could stand beside it, you could walk across its whole surface in an afternoon, and still have time to spare.
Keywords: magnetar dead star, dead star night sky, neutron star dark space
Scene 1 — Sub 2 (0:13–0:46)
It is smaller than a city, and it holds more mass than our Sun. And around it there is a magnetic field so strong that, at a distance of one thousand kilometres, the field would pull at the electrons in your atoms until the chemistry of your body could no longer hold together. That is the claim in the title of this video, and tonight we will test it slowly, the way you test anything that sounds too strange to be true.
Keywords: magnetar mass Sun, magnetar magnetic field, small star city scale
Scene 1 — Sub 3 (0:46–1:16)
We will look at what a magnetar is made of, where it comes from, what it does when it shakes, and what it did on a December day in two thousand and four, when a flash from one of these stars crossed our whole galaxy and brushed the top of our own sky. And before we rest, we will come back to those one thousand kilometres, and say plainly what they mean, and what they do not mean. There is no hurry.
Keywords: magnetar origin, magnetar shake flare, magnetar December 2004
Scene 1 — Sub 4 (1:17–1:45)
The star is not going anywhere. It has been sitting in the dark for thousands of years, spinning slowly, glowing faintly in X-rays, and waiting for its field to fade. So we will go quietly, one layer at a time, and by the end the most extreme magnet in the universe may feel a little less like a monster, and a little more like a place we can understand.
Keywords: magnetar spinning slow, magnetar X-ray glow, magnetar dark space
Scene 2 — Sub 1 (1:47–2:07)
When astronomers say a star is dead, they do not mean it has vanished. They mean it has stopped doing the one thing that kept it alive, which was burning fuel in its centre and pushing outward against its own weight. For most of a star's life, those two forces balance.
Keywords: dead star fuel, star gravity balance, star burning centre
Scene 2 — Sub 2 (2:08–2:32)
Gravity pulls everything inward, and the heat and light from nuclear burning push everything outward, and the star holds its shape for millions or billions of years. A magnetar begins with a star much larger than our Sun. Our Sun will end its life quietly, as a white dwarf, a cooling ember the size of the Earth.
Keywords: star gravity heat, nuclear burning star, star shape balance
Scene 2 — Sub 3 (2:32–2:56)
A magnetar's parent star is different. It is born heavy, it burns fast and bright, and it dies young, in an explosion that outshines whole galaxies for a short while. What is left behind, after the outer layers have been blown away into space, is the core, collapsed down to something almost impossibly small and dense.
Keywords: magnetar parent star, massive star explosion, supernova star death
Scene 2 — Sub 4 (2:57–3:10)
That core is the dead star of our story. It is not a black hole. It is a neutron star, and a magnetar is a neutron star with one extra, extraordinary property.
Keywords: neutron star core, magnetar not black hole, dead star core
Scene 2 — Sub 5 (3:10–3:35)
Its magnetic field is hundreds of times stronger than an ordinary neutron star's field, and about a thousand trillion times stronger than the field that turns a compass needle here on Earth. Everything else about tonight follows from that one fact, and from the slow, patient way that field moves and strains and sometimes breaks free.
Keywords: magnetar magnetic field, neutron star field trillion, Earth compass field
Scene 3 — Sub 1 (3:36–4:05)
To understand the magnetar, it helps to watch its birth, because the violence of that birth is what makes everything else possible. A massive star spends its life building heavier and heavier elements in its centre, like layers of an onion. Hydrogen becomes helium, helium becomes carbon and oxygen, and on through neon, magnesium, silicon, until at last the centre is mostly iron.
Keywords: magnetar birth supernova, massive star layers, star birth violence
Scene 3 — Sub 2 (4:06–4:22)
Iron is a dead end. A star cannot get energy from burning iron, so when the core becomes iron, the balance that held the star up for millions of years fails in less than a second. The core falls inward.
Keywords: star iron core, iron dead end star, star collapse iron
Scene 3 — Sub 3 (4:23–5:03)
Protons and electrons, which normally keep their distance from each other inside atoms, are crushed together until they merge and become neutrons. The outer layers of the star, no longer held up, crash down onto this collapsing core and rebound outward in a supernova, one of the brightest explosions in nature. The light from that explosion can outshine a whole galaxy, and the material it throws into space will one day become new stars, new planets, and, in time, the elements in our own bodies.
Keywords: neutron star protons electrons, supernova explosion shell, atoms crushed neutrons
Scene 3 — Sub 4 (5:03–5:42)
What remains at the centre is a ball of neutrons about twenty kilometres across, about the width of a city, holding about one and a half times the mass of the Sun. It spins, because the parent star was spinning, and like a figure skater pulling her arms in, the collapse has made it spin much faster. And it carries a magnetic field, because the parent star had one, and squeezing a magnetic field into a smaller space makes it stronger, the way squeezing a spring makes it push back harder.
Keywords: neutron star twenty kilometres, neutron star city width, neutron star spin magnetic
Scene 4 — Sub 1 (5:44–6:06)
It is worth pausing on that size, because the numbers are easy to say and hard to feel. Twenty kilometres is a distance you could drive in about twenty minutes on a quiet road. It is the width of a city, and it holds more mass than the Sun, which is more than a million kilometres across.
Keywords: neutron star twenty kilometres, city road distance, neutron star size scale
Scene 4 — Sub 2 (6:07–6:30)
If you could scoop out a teaspoon of neutron star matter and bring it here, it would weigh about a billion tons on Earth, roughly the weight of a mountain, balanced on a spoon. That density is not an exaggeration for effect. It is what happens when gravity wins completely over the ordinary structure of atoms.
Keywords: neutron star teaspoon mountain, neutron star matter weight, teaspoon mountain scale
Scene 4 — Sub 3 (6:31–7:06)
On Earth, atoms are mostly empty space, with a tiny nucleus in the middle and electrons moving far away around it. In a neutron star, that empty space has been squeezed out. The matter is almost entirely neutrons, packed together as tightly as nature allows, and the surface is covered by a crust of iron, incredibly strong, incredibly thin compared to the whole star, and holding back pressures that have no parallel anywhere else we can study.
Keywords: atom empty space, neutron star atoms squeezed, neutron star iron crust
Scene 4 — Sub 4 (7:07–7:33)
Most neutron stars are like this, and most of them are quiet in a particular way. They spin, they sweep beams of radio waves around like lighthouses, and astronomers call them pulsars. A magnetar is the same kind of object, and yet it behaves completely differently, because its magnetic field is not a side effect of its life.
Keywords: pulsar lighthouse beam, pulsar radio waves, neutron star pulsar spin
Scene 4 — Sub 5 (7:33–7:47)
Its magnetic field is its life. The field stores the energy, the field stresses the crust, and when the field moves, the star shakes, and the whole galaxy can notice.
Keywords: magnetar magnetic field life, magnetar field energy, magnetar crust stress
Scene 5 — Sub 1 (7:48–8:22)
Before we go further into the field itself, it helps to meet the ordinary neutron star first, because the contrast is what makes a magnetar strange. A pulsar is a neutron star that spins quickly, sometimes hundreds of times a second, and sends out beams of radio waves from its magnetic poles. As it spins, those beams sweep past the Earth like a lighthouse beam sweeping past a ship, and we hear them as regular pulses, steady as a clock.
Keywords: ordinary neutron star pulsar, pulsar lighthouse space, neutron star contrast
Scene 5 — Sub 2 (8:23–8:48)
Jocelyn Bell Burnell found the first one in nineteen sixty seven, and at first the regular signal was so precise that some people wondered, briefly, whether it might be a message. Pulsars are powered by their spin. They slow down, very gradually, as they radiate their rotational energy away, and over millions of years they grow quieter.
Keywords: Jocelyn Bell Burnell pulsar, pulsar discovery 1967, pulsar regular signal
Scene 5 — Sub 3 (8:49–9:24)
Magnetars are powered by something else. They spin slowly, once every few seconds rather than hundreds of times a second, and yet they shine brightly in X-rays and gamma rays, far more brightly than their slow spin could explain. That mismatch was the first clue that something else was feeding them, and that something else turned out to be the slow decay of their magnetic field, releasing energy stored in a field stronger than any other in the known universe.
Keywords: magnetar spin slow, magnetar X-ray bright, magnetar field power
Scene 5 — Sub 4 (9:25–9:40)
So tonight we are not following a lighthouse. We are following a star whose magnet is its engine, its weather, and, in time, its undoing. It does not spin fast enough to be a good clock.
Keywords: magnetar lighthouse magnet, magnetar engine weather, magnetar star magnet
Scene 5 — Sub 5 (9:40–10:00)
It does not shine steadily enough to be a good lamp. It stores its energy in silence, and then it lets it go, sometimes in small bursts, and very rarely in a flare so large that instruments across the solar system notice it all at once.
Keywords: magnetar energy silence, magnetar small bursts, magnetar giant flare
Scene 6 — Sub 1 (10:02–10:34)
Let us build the scale of that field slowly, because the numbers lose their meaning if we rush them. The magnetic field at the surface of the Earth, the field that turns a compass needle and helps shield us from the solar wind, is about half a gauss. A gauss is simply a unit for measuring magnetic strength, named after the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, and half a gauss is a gentle field, easy to live inside, easy to forget.
Keywords: Earth magnetic field compass, gauss magnetic field, compass needle Earth
Scene 6 — Sub 2 (10:36–11:14)
A fridge magnet is about one hundred gauss, two hundred times stronger than the Earth's field, strong enough to hold a photograph to a door. The magnets inside a hospital MRI machine reach about ten thousand gauss, and the strongest magnets humans have built in laboratories reach a few tens of thousands of gauss, and even those need careful engineering to hold together. An ordinary neutron star already has a field of about a trillion gauss, a million million times stronger than the Earth's field.
Keywords: fridge magnet, MRI machine magnet, magnet strength scale
Scene 6 — Sub 3 (11:15–11:42)
A magnetar's field is typically a hundred to a thousand times stronger still, reaching about one hundred trillion to one thousand trillion gauss. In the units physicists use for the strongest fields, that is ten to the power of fourteen, to ten to the power of fifteen gauss, and inside the star the field may be ten times stronger again.
Keywords: magnetar trillion gauss, neutron star field trillion, magnetar field power
Scene 6 — Sub 4 (11:42–12:12)
It is a field a thousand trillion times stronger than the one you are sitting in now. And because a magnetic field weakens with distance, falling off quickly as you move away from the star, that strength creates a kind of invisible geography around the magnetar, with zones where different things become impossible, and we will walk through those zones soon, one distance at a time.
Keywords: magnetar field distance, magnetic field weakening, magnetar invisible geography
Scene 7 — Sub 1 (12:13–12:38)
The field does not sit still. That is the most important thing to understand about a magnetar, and the reason it is not simply a strong magnet sitting quietly in space. Deep inside the star, the field is tangled and twisted, and it drifts slowly through the crust, the way a glacier moves through a valley, patiently and with enormous force.
Keywords: magnetar field moving, magnetar tangled field, neutron star field drift
Scene 7 — Sub 2 (12:39–13:02)
The crust of a neutron star is not like the crust of the Earth. It is made mostly of iron, and it is extraordinarily strong, far stronger than any steel we can make, because the pressure inside the star holds its atoms in a rigid lattice. And yet even that crust cannot hold forever against a field this strong.
Keywords: neutron star iron crust, Earth crust iron, neutron star crust strong
Scene 7 — Sub 3 (13:03–13:24)
As the field drifts, it stresses the crust, bending it and twisting it, building up strain the way bending a ruler builds up strain in your hands. For years, sometimes for decades, nothing visible happens. The star glows faintly, it spins slowly, it seems calm.
Keywords: magnetar crust strain, magnetar field stress crust, crust bending strain
Scene 7 — Sub 4 (13:24–13:51)
Then the strain passes a limit, and the crust cracks. Astronomers call that crack a starquake, and it is the closest thing in nature to an earthquake, except that the ground that breaks is iron under unimaginable pressure, and the energy released can outshine the Sun many times over in a fraction of a second. That is the mechanism at the heart of tonight's story.
Keywords: magnetar starquake crack, earthquake iron crust, magnetar crust break
Scene 7 — Sub 5 (13:52–14:18)
A magnetar is not violent because it is angry, or because it is young in the human sense. It is violent because it stores energy in its magnetic field the way a drawn bow stores energy in its string, and because its crust, strong as it is, must eventually give way and let some of that energy go. The small releases are called bursts.
Keywords: magnetar energy bow, magnetar field stored energy, magnetar violent field
Scene 7 — Sub 6 (14:18–14:34)
The rare, enormous releases are called giant flares. And the difference between them is not just size. It is the difference between a crack in the crust and a global rearrangement of the whole star.
Keywords: magnetar giant flare, magnetar burst flare, magnetar crust rearrangement