Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Magnetars, to blow your mind as well:
"X-ray photons readily split in two or merge. The vacuum itself is polarized, becoming strongly birefringent, like a calcite crystal. Atoms are deformed into long cylinders thinner than the quantum-relativistic de Broglie wavelength of an electron." In a field of about 10^5 Tesla atomic orbitals deform into rod shapes. At 10^10 Tesla, a hydrogen atom becomes a spindle 200 times narrower than its normal diameter., from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar
Edit:
"Die Massendichte, die einem derartigen Magnetfeld über seine Energiedichte in Kombination mit der Äquivalenz von Masse und Energie gemäß E = m c^2 zugeordnet werden kann, liegt im Bereich einiger Dutzend Kilogramm pro Kubikmillimeter (kg/mm3)", from german Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar#Entstehung
says that the mass density (via energy-mass equivalence) of such strong magnetic fields might be dozens of kilograms per cubic millimeter (kg/mm^3).
Mind. Blown.
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/14387/what-hap...
The coldest neutron star detected “T < 42,000 Kelvin” : https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.07998
Disclaimer: I am not an astrophysicist.
So you certainly have to recalculate all your reaction rates compared to laboratory conditions, and my guess would be, that in general the chemistry should look a lot more than reactions in plasmas, rather than normal (nicely stable) chemistry.
Most classes of stars are already hot enough that molecules are torn apart. The atoms are in a gas or plasma state. Pairs of atoms will pass through transient states that could be classed as “molecules” but they’re very short-lived. Electrons—a key part of chemical reactions—flow freely like in metal.
Hydrogen atoms are just a single proton with some number of neutrons. I’m not sure if the proton itself is stretched (Is a gluon a particle like a proton is a particle??), or if the EM field around the proton is so influenced that electrons move around it like it’s a rod/cylinder.
Insane! Clearly that doesn’t include the uncertainty in our understanding of physics or neutron stars.
Edit: I tried to work out the % that 20σ is, but it is so mind bogglingly small that there should be a law against using such an insane number in any serious context.
This is the strongest we have observed. Still really fascinating.
Somewhere, in the field of infinity, a whale materialized above a Three Stooges convention and landed on a newly sentient petunia, an infinite number of times since you started reading this sentence.
Perhaps not in the known universe, sure, but somewhere. So "known" is always the implicit qualifier, but it'd be a pain in the neck to diligently write "known universe" every single time when the people familiar enough with the material to note the distinction also understand that's what you meant anyway.
On the other hand this feels unconvincing to me. The language of science and physics is already obtuse and overly wordy, that's what seperates it from the noise of everyone else talking, because it trades precision for brevity and so it feels reliable . So there are infinite places to draw that line in the sand. Why do we stop right there? Why don't we just say what we mean instead of piling up a bunch of words into a statement which is objectively false without all the context.
Magnetars supposedly have up to 10¹¹ tesla. But I guess the evidence for that is more indirect.
> which is tens of millions of times stronger than what can be generated in Earth laboratories.
How hard is this to achieve? Billion $ or impossible?
Not sure, but Wiki says labs get higher?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(magnetic_...
On the funny side, the flat earthers would finally be right.
The second runner up is the Earth’s magnetic field.
He makes fun of his audience for ranking it that high, but planetary magnetic fields are no joke.
Even if observable electromagnetic radiation was traveling at the speed of light, which most is not, we are looking at ancient history, because once this EM reaches earth we are studying phenomena that occurred >189 centuries ago.
We don't have a way to know if this star is even still there.
Everything studied in astronomy at significant light years distance is ancient phenomena, we are just seeing it/sensing it/evaluating it now.
