A new study suggests that stars may be split in half by “relativistic blades,” or super-strong flows of plasma created by extremely strong magnetic fields. And the blades dividing these stars could explain some of the brightest explosions in the universe.

The study’s authors, from New York University’s Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, summarized their findings in a paper published on the arXiv preprint database in September. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Researchers are searching for the origin of certain types of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). GRBs are among the most powerful explosions but they often occur so far away that we can only see them as a brief but intense flash of extreme light.mmm — radiation. Only a few known objects can produce the energy needed to power a gamma-ray burst, so most astrophysicists assume that this is the case or black holesor magnetars – possibly when they are involved in something violent, like tearing apart a star. But astronomers are trying to explain why some gamma-ray bursts disappear so slowly.

In the new study, the authors suggest that these long GRBs may form when some massive stars die. The star’s core collapses to form a neutron star, a city-sized ball of superdense neutrons surrounded by heavy layers of hydrogen and helium. This neutron star can develop an extremely strong magnetic field due to its rapid compression and rotation. This turns the neutron star into a magnetar containing the strongest magnetic fields in the known universe.

A newborn magnetar is surrounded by chaos. Its own gravitational pull pulls in the remnants of its host star’s atmosphere, but intense radiation and magnetic fields spin this plasma wildly. In previous studies, astronomers concluded that a jet formed in this vortex along the magnetar’s rotation axis and moved through the dying star.

But the authors of the new study noticed that the magnetar’s magnetic fields can also emit intense bursts of radiation along the magnetar’s equator. Created by the extreme centrifugal forces of a spinning star, these beams of radiation carry more energy than a supernova explosion, creating a blade that moves outward from the inside of the star at nearly the speed of light.

The study’s authors found that this “relativistic blade” was able to perfectly slice the star in half, splitting it in half as it exited.

The blade then travels a distance several times the radius of the parent star, eventually slowing down, potentially accounting for some long-lived GRBs.

The star’s fate has been determined. As the blade moves, it collects more and more material, which eventually binds to the blade as it moves outward. The blade also causes instability in the star itself, eventually leading to its death.

For this study, researchers showed that a relativistic blade can explain such GRBs. In the next step, the researchers plan to study how the blade evolves over time and exactly how the next stellar death occurs. This will allow them to determine the basic properties of such bursts and determine whether some gamma-ray bursts that scientists have previously observed can be explained by this model.