US EditionAstronomers Witness Birth of a Magnetar for the First Time
The supernova SN 2024afav’s brightness oscillated with increasing frequency, providing the first observational evidence of magnetar birth and general relativity effects in stellar explosions.
- On March 11, 2026, astronomers reported witnessing the birth of a magnetar in SN 2024afav, tracked for more than 200 days by Las Cumbres Observatory and ATLAS; a paper appeared in Nature.
- Kasen's 2010 hypothesis holds that SN 2024afav's superluminous brightness arose from a magnetar formed by a progenitor star around 25 times the Sun's mass.
- Observers measured SN 2024afav’s four brightness bumps with shortening intervals producing the chirp matching Lense–Thirring precession of a misaligned accretion disk and estimated a spin period 4.2 milliseconds and magnetic field about 300 trillion times Earth's.
- The study confirms Dan Kasen's magnetar theory and shows general relativity explains a supernova's 'chirp'; Joseph Farah expects many more with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
- Despite the finding, researchers caution magnetars may not power all Type I superluminous supernovae; alternative models include circumstellar material interaction and a newly formed black hole with misaligned accretion disk, while fast radio bursts remain a possible magnetar connection.
30 Articles
30 Articles
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