Content:
Using a recently developed technique to detect magnetic fields inside stars, a group of astronomers, including Matteo Cantiello and Lars Bildsten from UC Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP), has discovered that strong magnetic fields are very common in stars. The group's findings appear in the journal Nature.
"We have applied a novel theoretical idea that we developed just a few months ago to thousands of stars and the results are just extraordinary," said Cantiello, a specialist in stellar astrophysics at KITP.
Previously, only a very small percentage of stars were known to have strong magnetic fields. Therefore, current scientific models of how stars evolve do not include magnetic fields as a fundamental component.