magnetar plasma geometry

In a binary star system, a white dwarf acts like a vacuum cleaner, pulling gas from its companion star. If the dwarf has a magnetic field, the gas does not fall anywhere but flows toward the poles, like iron filings to a magnet. There it accumulates into a pile. But what keeps this pile from spreading out?

Two dancers on one stage: one pulls the partner in one direction, the other in the opposite. In the crystal Cu2(OH)3Br, known as botallackite, copper atoms form chains where the spins (magnetic moments) of neighboring ions align either parallel, as in a ferromagnet, or antiparallel, as in an antiferromagnet.

A sculptor looks at a block of marble and sees the figure within, waiting to be freed from excess material. Instead of adding clay, he removes everything that is not part of the form. The authors of a new study on magnetic resonance took a similar approach: rather than complicating the tissue model by adding ever more details, they stripped away the superfluous to reveal the essence.

A copper plate the size of a coin vaporizes under the laser's strike in billionths of a second. The hot copper cloud slams into cold helium like a jet of steam into frosty air. The images show a distinct bubble with thin filaments at the edges — the plasma doesn't expand uniformly but breaks into fibers as thin as a human hair.

A white dwarf is the cooling core of a Sun-like star. Its fate hinges on mass: there's a strict Chandrasekhar limit (about 1.4 solar masses) beyond which the star collapses further.

A magnetic mirror is a tube open at both ends. The magnetic field inside is arranged so that hot plasma doesn't leak out: at the ends, the field lines bunch up like a cork in a bottle. Plasma particles flying toward the exit are repelled by these "corks" and bounce back. But some still escape: that's the classic "loss cone" argument.

A star's radius drops by a thousand kilometers. Not because its mass increased, but because its own magnetic field squeezed the crust like an invisible corset.

10¹⁵ Gauss — that's the magnetic field found on some white dwarfs. It is billions of times stronger than what a compass shows on Earth. A white dwarf is not a star in the usual sense, but a cooled core the size of a planet. Inside, gravity opposes the pressure of degenerate electrons.

A magnetic field of 42 tesla — about a million times stronger than Earth's field. In such a field, the crystal SrCu₂(BO₃)₂ behaves unusually: its magnetization doesn't increase smoothly but in jumps, pausing at specific values.

A waterfall that doesn't heat up from the fall but freezes — that's roughly how gas behaves as it flows onto a neutron star in an X-ray pulsar when the star shines dimly. Usually, infalling matter is heated to a white-hot glow, but new work shows the opposite.

In a crystal that for centuries was called 'fool's gold,' physicists have spotted genuine treasure. The compound MnTe2 with a pyrite structure has become the stage for a quantum ballet: spin waves here twist into left- and right-handed vortices, with the twist direction firmly tied to momentum.

Space is threaded with magnetic fields. They exist around galaxies, stars, and even in nearly empty voids — the vast empty spaces between galaxy clusters. It's usually thought that fields are amplified from weak 'seed' fields by turbulence, much like a dynamo. But the origin of the seed fields themselves has remained a puzzle.

Light from a distant blazar, an active galactic nucleus whose jet points our way, travels for billions of years. Along the way, it triggers cascades of charged particles that the intergalactic magnetic field deflects sideways. This creates a blurred gamma-ray glow around the blazar: a secondary halo.

A dead star with a magnetic field billions of times stronger than Earth's is a magnetar. Its crust cracks, sending a powerful X-ray burst into space. But some of that light doesn't reach us in its usual form. In an ultra-strong field, photons can turn into gravitational waves — the trembling of space itself.

A sunspot cools, and above it a dark filament, a prominence, hangs for weeks. Inside it, like a compressed spring, hides the magnetic field. It can be laid out in neat arches, or it can be twisted into a tight rope.

Red giants are swollen, aging stars. Deep inside, an ocean of plasma churns: heat forces its way from the core to the surface, generating waves like a mighty surf. The star's magnetic field acts like an invisible seabed – it steers these waves, changing their height and speed.

Neutron stars are super-dense spheres of the remnants of exploded stars. Some of them we see as pulsars — cosmic lighthouses sending out radio bursts. What's inside them long remained a mystery. Physicists assumed that hidden fields could affect their structure, but it was believed that if the field is short-range, its effect is negligible.

Inside a neutron star, matter is compressed so intensely that atomic nuclei fuse into long strands and flat sheets. Astrophysicists call these structures nuclear pasta. At their surface, the density of matter plummets to nearly zero, like diving out of thick jelly into thin air. It's this sharp transition that creates the unusual effect.

A neutron star is a sphere the size of a city but with the mass of an entire Sun. Its magnetic field can tear atoms apart from thousands of kilometers away. Yet until now, it was a mystery how this field is arranged inside: whether it is twisted into tight ropes or more like neat lines radiating from the poles.

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe was a boiling cauldron. But then, according to a new hypothesis, it suddenly cooled dramatically — far more than previously thought. In this icy world, dark matter particles, like tiny pendulums, froze and did not begin their oscillations.

An ordinary magnet always carries two poles — north and south. Split it in half, and each piece immediately grows its own pair. But deep in particle theory lives a strange notion: the monopole — a particle carrying just one magnetic charge, a lone pole without a partner.

In a pot of boiling soup, tiny droplets of fat occasionally flare up — a hundred times hotter than the broth. That's roughly how future fusion plasma works: the bulk of ions heats to hundreds of millions of degrees, while a small admixture of "fast" particles (born from nuclear fusion) is accelerated even further.

Two swift streams of charged particles collide, and magnetic field lines begin to tear and reconnect. This process powers solar flares and auroras. It was usually assumed that all particles behave alike, like bullets from the same gun. But each particle has a tiny top: its intrinsic rotation, or spin.

A magnetic field in plasma resembles a stretched soap film: pressure from inside pushes it out, while surface tension pulls it in, giving it shape. Here too, magnetic pressure and tension forces balance each other.

The crown of a huge tree sways in the wind, but the roots and trunk are hidden underground. On the Sun, magnetic fields play the role of such invisible roots. They emerge from the depths, thread through the entire atmosphere, and govern the motion of the hot gas — plasma.

A planet's magnetic field is like an invisible shield: it catches charged particles from the solar wind and stretches out behind the planet into a long tail, like a fluttering scarf.

Gas falls onto a neutron star — the ultra-dense remnant of an exploded star. This gas accumulates at the magnetic poles and forms a mountain. But a mountain on a neutron star is not like one on Earth: it is held not by rock but by magnetic field lines, like iron filings on a magnet. When there is too much gas, the mountain begins to break apart.

In a large gas cloud where stars are born, the magnetic field lines are roughly aligned in one direction, like the fibers in a piece of felt. But look inside, into the dense clumps that will eventually become stars, and the picture changes: there the lines are twisted every which way, like a ball of yarn after a kitten has played with it.

Previously, astronomers calculated galaxy mass as if they were perfect spheres. But a galaxy is a flat pancake. The new 'Lost and Found' model takes the actual shape into account: it sums up the gravitational pull from all parts of the disk, not just the central bulge. The result is stunning: many galaxies need a third less invisible dark matter than previously thought.

The center of our galaxy is a crowded kitchen where several dishes are simmering at once, and their steam blends into a single cloud. X-rays from the exploded star's remnant, from the stellar wind around the supermassive black hole, and from hot gas between stars all overlap.

A magnetar is a neutron star with a magnetic field hundreds of millions of times stronger than Earth's. If you brought an ordinary magnet near such a field, it would instantly lose its magnetism, and atoms would stretch into thin filaments.

A powerful laser strikes a tiny target, and it instantly turns into a cloud of scorching gas — plasma. Within this cloud, magnetic fields spontaneously arise. Like invisible hands, they prevent heat from freely escaping the hot core.

In the dark cloud G351, where new stars are about to emerge from gas and dust, the magnetic field has bent into an hourglass shape. Such a shape is a sign that the field is not just watching star birth from the sidelines but is actively taking part. Scientists used the SOFIA telescope, mounted on an airplane, to see the dust in the cloud.

The edge of a magnet works like a guitar fret: a string pressed near the edge sounds different, with a richer set of overtones. Magnetic waves in a thin strip of nickel and iron behave in much the same way.

A white dwarf is what remains of a star like the Sun after it sheds its outer layers. What's left is a hot core the size of Earth but with a mass close to that of the Sun. A teaspoon of this material would weigh as much as a truck. Some of these stars have extremely strong magnetic fields — a billion times stronger than Earth's.

In a piece of manganese oxide just a few atomic layers thick, electrons behave like a crowd on an escalator: each moves by its own rules, but together they create a common flow. Physicists shone soft X-rays on such a film and knocked electrons out.

A neutron star is a city the size of a metropolis squeezed into a small asteroid. Around it, plasma, a gas of charged particles, seethes, and waves ripple through it like ripples on a pond. There are three kinds of waves: Alfvén (A), ordinary (O), and extraordinary (X).

A neutron star the size of a city spins faster than a kitchen blender, flinging particles around itself. A glowing cloud forms around it — called a pulsar halo. The shape of this cloud depends on invisible magnetic fields that, like ocean currents, steer the particles.

The Sun is not a calm sphere. Waves constantly ripple through its interior, like a bell after being struck. These oscillations reach the surface and reveal what's happening on the far, invisible side. Astronomers have long been able to 'listen' to this ringing and find large sunspot groups there.

The VLA radio telescope peered into the Boomerang Nebula — a cloud inflated by the wind from a rapidly spinning neutron star. The new images reveal details as small as a lunar disk on the sky: an elongated core around the pulsar and a long arc curving around it from the north.