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As you all know, stars are huge balls of incandescent hydrogen gas, whose atoms due to high temperatures fuse to form Helium and release energy in the form of heat.
The balance between the force of gravity and the energy released by the fusion causes the stars to take a spherical shape and not explode, releasing these gases through space.
If the star is large enough, as the hydrogen is depleted, the inner layers begin to fuse Helium to produce Carbon, but this fusion releases less energy.
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The heavier the atoms that fuse, the less energy is released, so if the star has enough mass, there comes a time when the energy released in the fusion is less than the force that gravity exerts on it and the star collapses until it becomes in a neutron star.
That is, the star is compressed in such a way by the force of gravity that, a star the size of our sun would stay about 30 km in diameter but, would still weigh the same as the sun.
Some of these neutron stars rotate at high speed and emit large X-ray jets at their poles, which become visible at each turn, which, for the observer, produces something similar to a lighthouse and are called pulsars.
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A Spanish scientific team together with ESA and NASA have discovered one of these "newborn" pulsars, just about 240 years ago located 15,000 light years from us.
Swift J1818.0−1607, which is the unromantic name they have given it, is also a magnetar, a pulsar that is characterized by having very intense magnetic fields, up to billions of times the earth's magnetic field.
Studying these phenomena can help astronomers understand the large bursts of high-energy lightning that occur in the universe.
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