this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Astronomy
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Someone help me out: maybe that's really magnetic for a star, but 43,000 gauss isn't insanely strong, is it? We measure some magnets in teslas, which is 10,000 gauss.
So it's a 4.3 tesla star.
I'm guessing this is somehow proportionate to the mass of the magnet, so a 1 tesla, 1 gram magnet is going to be much less powerful than a 1 tesla, 1 kg magnet? So something the size of a star would still have a massive magnetic field?
Well you have to put it in perspective. The earth has a magnetic field of 0.3 - 0.5 gauss. That puts this star at 143,000x as strong. Then you compare to the sun, which is 1 gauss, so this star is 43,000x as strong.
Okay, you might say, that's a lot, but this star is also 4x as massive as the sun. What about other stars bigger than the sun?
Beltugese is 16.5 - 19x the mass of the sun, and it's magnetic field has been carefully studied and measured to be about 1 gauss.
So yes, for a main sequence star this beast is a huge outlier.
According to the article, this seems to be a Wolf-Rayet star though, decidedly not main sequence.
But your point remains, it is a massive outlier.