Discovery of two magnetic massive stars in the Orion Nebula Cluster: a clue to the origin of neutron star magnetic fields?

Abstract

The origin of the magnetic fields in neutron stars, and the physical differences between magnetars and strongly magnetised radio pulsars are still under vigorous debate. It has been suggested that the properties of the progenitors of neutron stars (the massive OB stars), such as rotation, magnetic fields and mass, may play an important role in the outcome of core collapse leading to type II SNe. Therefore, knowing the magnetic properties of the progenitor OB stars would be an important asset for constraining models of stellar evolution leading to the birth of a neutron star. We present here the beginning of a broad study with the goal of characterising the magnetic properties of main sequence massive OB stars. We report the detection of two new massive magnetic stars in the Orion Nebula Cluster: Par 1772 (HD 36982) and NU Ori (HD 37061), for which the estimated dipole polar strengths, with 1 sigma error bars, are 1150 (+320,-200) G and 650 (+220,-170) G respectively.

Accepted by MNRAS

References in corpus (4)

• A search for strong, ordered magnetic fields in Herbig Ae/Be stars
• An Extensive Collection of Stellar Wind X-ray Source Region Emission Line Parameters,Temperatures, Velocities, and Their Radial Distributions as Obtained from Chandra Observations of 17 OB Stars
• The magnetic field of the pre-main sequence Herbig Ae star HD 190073
• Rotation and chemical abundances of Ap/Bp stars in the open cluster NGC 6475

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Mass loss from hot massive stars
• X-Ray Spectroscopy of Stars
• Highly Accelerated Diamagnetic Plasmoids: A New X-ray Production Mechanism for OB Stellar Winds
• Detection of Magnetic Massive Stars in the Open Cluster NGC 3766
• The MiMeS Project: Magnetism in Massive Stars
• Magnetic fields, winds and X-rays of massive stars in the Orion Nebula Cluster
• Non-thermal neutrinos from supernovae leaving a magnetar