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Hubble spots a magnetar zipping through the Milky Way

Magnetars are among the rarest—and weirdest—denizens of the galactic zoo. They have powerful magnetic fields and may be the source of fast radio bursts (FRBs). A team of astronomers led by European Space Agency researcher Ashley Chrimes recently used the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to track one of these monsters called SGR 0501+4516 (SGR0501, for short, and SGR stands for Soft Gamma Repeater). It’s whipping through the Milky Way at a rate as high as 65 kilometers per second. The big challenge was to find its birthplace and figure out its origin.

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