Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2023

46 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2023 ASTRO PUBLISHING influence the behaviour of stars and could explain why traditional mod- els failed to describe HD 45166, which is located about 3000 light- years away in the constellation Mo- noceros. “I remember having a Eureka moment while reading the literature: ‘What if the star is mag- netic?’,” says Shenar, who is cur- rently based at the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain. Shenar and his team set out to study the star using multiple facilities around the globe. The main obser- vations were conducted in February HD 45166, the star that might become a magnetar by ESO − Bárbara Ferreira D espite having been observed for over 100 years, the enig- matic nature of the star HD 45166 could not be easily explained by conventional models, and little was known about it beyond the fact that it is one of a pair of stars, is rich in helium and is a few times more massive than our Sun. “This star became a bit of an obsession of mine,” says Tomer Shenar, the lead author of a study on this object published in Science and an as- tronomer at the University of Ams- terdam, the Netherlands. “Tomer and I refer to HD 45166 as the ‘zom- bie star’,” says co-author and ESO astronomer Julia Bodensteiner, based in Germany. “This is not only because this star is so unique, but also because I jokingly said that it turns Tomer into a zombie.” Having studied similar helium-rich stars before, Shenar thought mag- netic fields could crack the case. In- deed, magnetic fields are known to