Question: what if we could observe a magnetar in our solar system what would happen to us? thank you :)

Phillip Wilkinson answered on 14 Mar 2013:

It depends where it was in relation to Earth, but either way it won’t be fun!

As a typical neutron star has a mass of around 1 to 3 Suns, but condensed into an incredibly small area (the size of a city), they are incredibly dense. So dense a thimble of Magnetar Star material would way 100 million tonnes. So its gravitational pull is very likely to effect orbits in the solar system.

Lets call this Magnetar Star Pete to make it easier. So it could pull is from our orbit around the Sun, and we could start orbiting Pete if we were close enough, we would be torn apart by its magnetic field and die. Or we could start orbiting Jupiter freeze to death and die, or just be ejected from the Solar System all together and just float around deep space and we would die.

Now assuming Pete and the Sun get along and are able to from a binary star system, so they orbit each other while we orbit them, we still have to worry about the intense magnetic field. They are the most magnetic things in the universe. If it was closer than the moon for example, it would destroy all credit cards on Earth. So if it was near the sun, we could speculate that it would massively impact the Earths magnetosphere. This magnetic sphere protects us from damaging particles emitted by the sun, such as solar winds. In fact if Pete got rid of our magnetosphere then our atmosphere would be blown away and we would all die.

However, Pete is also slightly temperamental and is prone to gamma ray bursts. If a powerful enough gamma ray burst where to hit Earth it would cause a mass-extinction event. So we will also die from this.

Not sure exactly what would happen, most probably everything would die.