The magnetic fields of massive, fast-spinning stars are nearly ten times stronger than astronomers have assumed for decades.
Be stars are massive, blue stars that spin so fast they throw off a decretion disk of gas. Until now, scientists believed these stars had very weak magnetic fields, typically under one hundred gauss. New measurements show that these fields can actually reach several hundred gauss, which is a game-changer for stellar evolution. These strong fields significantly change how the stars interact with their binary companions and how they eventually die. This discovery means we have to rewrite our models for some of the most violent and energetic systems in the galaxy. It explains why some stars behave in ways that seemed to defy our previous magnetic theories.
The magnetic fields in Be stars are stronger than previously suggested
arXiv · 2605.04580
Recent observational studies suggest that Be stars most likely are formed through the process of mass transfer in binary systems. In view of the wide consensus that the origin of the magnetic field in stars with radiative envelopes involves binary interaction processes, searching for magnetic fields in Be stars appears especially promising. As a pilot project, we searched for the presence of magnetic fields in a sample of seven well-known Be stars. We used high-resolution HARPSpol spectra to mea