The Strongest Magnetic Field In The Universe

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Chinese experts recently studied an accretion disk of the x-ray puslar GROJ1008-57 and they found out it has a magnetic field with power of roughly 1 billion Tesla.

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Image by skeeze from Pixabay

Here on Earth we do have experience with very weak and pretty strong magnetic fields. But even the most powerful magnetic fields we ever created pale in comparison to the gigantic and extreme magnetic fields we can observe out in the Universe.

A team working at the space x-ray telescope Insight-HXMT recently studied the accretion disk of the x-ray puslar GRO J1008-57 which is rapidly injesting matter and shines intensly in the x-ray part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

These observations tell us that this particular pulsar is surrounded by a magnetic field with the power of roughly 1 billion Tesla. This is the strongest detected magnetic field we ever detected in the known Universe.

The scientists observed GRO J1008-57 during a burst of its radiation which happened in August of 2017. By analyzing the observed radiation they came to the conclusion that the magnetic field near the pulsar reaches truly insane values. One billion Tesla is seven orders of magnitude stronger than our strongest laboratory made magnetic fields.

The Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT), also known as Insight is the first Chinese x-ray space telescope. It has a number of advanced devices to observe the Universe in the X-ray part of the spectrum in all high, medium, and low energies.

This almost three-ton observatory went into space on the 14th June of 2017 to observe black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, active galactic cores and other phenomena that send out large amount of X-ray radiation.

For some time we have known that neutron stars have the most powerful known magnetic fields. The pulsar GRO J1008-57 is a binary star with a neutron stars – known as a Neutron star X-ray Binary. The pulsar steals matter from it’s sister-star and this creates accretion disk around it.

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