14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers operating an impressive number of ground- and space-based telescope recently managed to identify the second member of an extremely elusive class of cosmic objects. The unusual star exhibits the properties of both pulsars and magnetars.
In order to observe it, astronomers used the NASA Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer and Chandra X-ray Observatory, the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton, the Japanese Suzaku satellite, and the Gran Telescopio Canarias and the Green Bank Telescope, both on the ground.
Both magnetars and pulsars are variants of neutron stars, dead massive stars that were not heavy enough to collapse into a black hole. While the former have extremely intense magnetic fields and X-ray emissions, the latter spin extremely fast and produce pulse radio waves.
The newly-found object spins just as fast as a pulsar, while displaying a magnetic field just as intense as that of a magnetar. The discovery indicates that the first object to be found was not a fluke of nature, and that this may be another, previously unrecognized class of stars in the Universe.