There’s a star racing through our galaxy at more than 110,000 miles per hour, and it’s basically a cosmic horror show.
Astronomers have been tracking SGR 0501+4516, a bizarre “zombie star” with a magnetic field so intense it could obliterate a human being’s atomic structure from hundreds of miles away. And here’s the weird part: no one knows how it got here.
First discovered in 2008, the object is a magnetar—a rare type of neutron star with an absurdly powerful magnetic field, about 100 trillion times stronger than Earth’s. There are only about 30 of these monsters known in our galaxy. SGR 0501+4516 is one of them, and it’s not just spinning in place—it’s hauling cosmic ass.
A Zombie Star That Can Shred Human Atoms Is Racing Through the Galaxy
A new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics used data from the Hubble Space Telescope and ESA’s Gaia spacecraft to calculate its trajectory. Turns out, the magnetar is not only unusually fast, but it’s also headed in a direction that doesn’t line up with any known supernova remnant, which is how these things are typically born.
“Tracing the magnetar’s trajectory thousands of years into the past showed that there were no other supernova remnants or massive star clusters with which it could be associated,” NASA said in a statement.
Basically, this thing shouldn’t exist—or at least, not like this.
One theory? It might have formed through the direct collapse of a white dwarf, which skips the usual stellar explosion and instead just caves in on itself to form a dense neutron star.
“Normally, the [supernova] scenario leads to the ignition of nuclear reactions, and the white dwarf exploding, leaving nothing behind,” said study co-author Andrew Levan. “But… the white dwarf can instead collapse into a neutron star. We think this might be how [this magnetar] was born.”
If so, that could help explain another astrophysical mystery: fast radio bursts, or FRBs, which are flashes of high-energy radiation from deep space that sometimes come from galaxies too old to host exploding stars.
And while SGR 0501+4516 isn’t headed toward us (phew), it’s still kind of terrifying. NASA noted that if it passed within half the distance of the Moon, it would wipe out all magnetic data on Earth. If you were unlucky enough to get within 600 miles, it would shred your atoms apart.
Think of it as a cosmic death ray—just one that happens to be drifting silently across the galaxy, with no clear origin, and a magnetic field that could destroy everything you’ve ever loved.
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