Physics professor and student measure the magnetic field of a neutron star

Dr. Arash Bodaghee, associate professor of Physics and Astronomy, and his Scholar, Cody Cox, '22, published an article in The Astrophysical Journal: the top-rated peer-reviewed journal devoted solely to Astronomy and Astrophysics. Using X-ray observations from NASA's NuSTAR space telescope, Cox and Bodaghee studied a high-mass X-ray binary in which a star several times more massive than the sun is paired with a neutron star (i.e., the remnant core of a massive star after its supernova). Their analysis revealed a candidate cyclotron line enabling them to measure the strength of the neutron star’s magnetic field for the first time. This object joins a list of roughly 50 neutron stars of this type with known magnetic fields, two of which were discovered by Bodaghee. The article by Bodaghee et al. (2023) is free to access at ApJ: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/acd541.

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