The fact that a neutron star is home to such jets is not a surprise in and of itself. "We've seen jets coming from all types of neutrons stars that are pulling material from their companions," said lead author Jakob van den Eijnden of the University of Amsterdam in a press release. "[But] never before have we seen a jet coming from a neutron star with a very strong magnetic field."
According to current theory, neutron stars with extremely intense magnetic fields like SW J0243 should not be capable of producing such jets. Our working theories — backed by decades of observations — suggest that extremely strong magnetic fields should overpower and prevent the formation of jets around neutron stars. But according to van den Eijnden, "Our clear discovery of a jet in SW J0243 disproves that longstanding idea."
However, as the authors note in their paper, there is still much more work to be done. Before they are able to eliminate all other possible explanations for the apparent jets — which range from intense stellar winds to shock waves within the accretion disk — they need to gather more observational evidence to prove the jets really do exist.
But if their findings hold up, (or more jets are observed around other strongly magnetized neutron stars), according to co-author Nathalie Degenaar, "This discovery not only means we have to revise our ideas about jets from such systems, but also opens up exciting new areas of research."
szech1sauce on September 28th, 2018 at 19:01 UTC »
Published neutron star expert here. It shouldn't force anyone to "rethink" anything. There's tons of isolated neutron stars whose surface fields exceed 1012 G which produce their own jets: the Crab pulsar (B=3.8e12 G), the Vela pulsar (3.4e12), B1509-58 (3.6e12), J1846-0258 (1.5e13), J0205+6449 (4.9e13), J1930+1852 (1.0e13), and many, many others. In fact, the stronger the magnetic field, the easier it is for plasma to escape the immense gravitational pull of the NS surface. The hypothesis that accreting NSs with magnetic fields over 1012 G (which the headline refers to) is not widely accepted, nor is there much evidence for it.
The discovery is cool, but the astronomy.com headline is sensationalist trash (as are the headlines of ~90% of interesting press releases). Neutron stars frequently create powerful jets.
ItsSoFetch on September 28th, 2018 at 16:57 UTC »
This is an awesome explanation of these types of neutron stars from the crash course series on astronomy. I recommend watching the whole series but this particular episode is great.
HopefullNugget on September 28th, 2018 at 15:16 UTC »
I wonder what kind of weird stuff happens close to these stars. Like with the fabric of the universe. I remember reading that close to these types of magnetic fields, one weird thing that happens is atoms get stretched out into a spindle shape