Trio of high-end telescopes spot slowest known magnetar

Astronomers have found evidence of a magnetar — magnetised neutron star — that spins much slower than the slowest of its kind known until now, which spin around once every 10 seconds.
•    The magnetar 1E 1613 — at the centre of RCW 103, the remains of a supernova explosion located about 9,000 light years from Earth — rotates once every 24,000 seconds.
•    On June 22, 2016, an instrument aboard NASA’s Swift telescope captured the release of a short burst of X-rays from 1E 1613.
•    The Swift detection caught astronomers’ attention because the source exhibited intense, extremely rapid fluctuations on a time scale of milliseconds, similar to other known magnetars.
•    These exotic objects possess the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe — trillions of times that observed on the Sun — and can erupt with enormous amounts of energy.
•    These properties include the relative amounts of X-rays produced at different energies and the way the neutron star cooled after the 2016 burst and another burst seen in 1999.
•    The source is rotating once every 6.67 hours, much slower than the slowest magnetars known until now, which spin around once every 10 seconds.