Neutron stars are pretty impressive, what with being the collapsed core of a super giant star that didn’t go supernova and all that, but when you go one step further you get magnetars. These guys collapsed in on themselves to an object up to three times the mass of our sun but only about 20 kilometres in diameter.
Our guest on this edition of Talkin’ Science, PhD student Marcus Lower, working with the ARC Center for Gravitational Wave Discovery used the Parkes Radio Telescope between May and October last year to study a very young magnetar, Swift J1818.0-1607, and what they found has raised a number of questions about these very mysterious stellar remnants…
Marcus beams in to give us more info on this Talkin’ Science Interview.