Astrophysicists spot possible 'missing link' between weird magnetars and pulsars.

Researchers have seemingly found a "missing link" between two types of pulsars.

Pulsars are fast-spinning neutron stars, the superdense, collapsed cores left over from the explosive deaths of massive stars. Pulsars emit beams of radiation from their poles that appear to pulse when they observed from Earth, hence the public figure.(Pulsars don't pulse, though; that's an outcome of the object's rotation.)

Scientists had thought that two kinds of pulsars — magnets, which sport extremely powerful magnetic fields, and rotary motion-powered pulsars — emit their beams in different ways. But a new study suggests that these extreme objects have more in common than was previously taken for granted.

"Our written report has given us a new understanding of the neutron stars with high magnetic fields," study leader Chin-Ping Hu, a visiting researcher at the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research in Japan, said in a statement.

On March 12, scientists discovered a new gamma-ray burst with the Burst Alert Telescope aboard NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a place-based gamma-ray telescope. The object, J1818.0-1607, which the researchers believe is a magnetar, immediately inspired followup X-ray observations with the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an instrument aboard the International Space Station.

Using NICER, the researchers found that the magnetar takes in a pulsation period — the time between stellar pulsations — of 1.36 seconds, the shortest ever spotted in a magnetar. They also found that the magnetar is comparably young, forming just 420 years ago (from our perspective, anyway; the object lies 16,000 light-years from Earth, so everything astronomers are noticing with the magnetar happened long ago). Oddly, they also found that this magnetar's X-ray emission was lower than that of other magnets.

Notably, the team realized that the magnetar was exhibiting "spin-down behaviour." Because of this, they think that its emissions were, at least in part, powered by rotation. It is important because, typically, rotation-powered pulsars are thought to be the ones that produce beams through rotating. So this finding draws the two objects closer together and expands scientists' understanding of how and why these objects produce their beams, team members said.

Additionally, Hu added, "recent radio observations suggest that magnets may be a cause of mysterious phenomena called fast radio bursts, and then we look forward to investigating further."