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Plasma bursts from a magnetar starquake in this artist’s conception, an eruption that can create a gamma ray flare.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith/USRA/GESTAR
Nature’s most magnetic objects, ripped apart in starquakes, can unleash powerful flashes of light
Apr. 8, 2021 , 2:00 PM
On 15 April 2020, a wave of gamma rays, nature’s most powerful kind of light, washed across the Solar System like a storm front. First contact came above Mars, where photons at energies comparable to the radiation from a nuclear bomb peppered a Russian particle detector on NASA’s Mars Odyssey probe. Six minutes later, the burst of light lit up a solar wind probe between the Sun and Earth. Five seconds after that, the signal splashed into specialized detectors on Earth’s surface.