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Asked by to Thomas, Simon, Daniel, Clara, Becky on 12 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Daniel Roach answered on 12 Mar 2014:
Magnetism is a funny thing… you see, whilst neutrons have no charge, they have a quantity known as ‘spin’ – it’s a quantum number, and things with spin can generate magnetic fields.
So if you have a star made from huge numbers of pressurised, ‘spinning’ neutrons, you get a very big magnetic field indeed!
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Thomas Elias Cocolios answered on 12 Mar 2014:
The neutrons do have a magnetic field themselves. Although we might see them as fundamental particles, they are actually big bags filled with quarks & gluons that are charged (the quarks) and move around all the time. As such, their current creates a magnetic field and when all are put together, well, things happen…
Note as well that, although we call them ‘neutron stars’, they have other particles in their structure (e.g. protons, electrons) and we are not certain that the neutrons remain intact in the core: they could “deconfine’ and you end up with a soup of quarks and gluons! Tasty!
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Clara Nellist answered on 12 Mar 2014:
To expand a bit on what Daniel and Thomas have already said. The basic building blocks we have to make almost all the stuff you see around us are:
– electrons, and it’s heavier cousins, muons and taus
– some neutrinos, very light particles that don’t interact with stuff very often, but are created in certain kinds of nuclear reactions
– bosons, which carry forces during interactions, including the gluons that Thomas mentioned (but we won’t go into these right now)
– and, quarks!There are six quarks all together, called (imaginatively) up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. The up, charm and top quarks have a charge of +2/3 of that of an electron, and the down, strange and bottom quarks have a charge of -1/3 of an electron. To make a neutron, you need to combine 1 up quark and 2 down quarks. Which gives you: +2/3 – 1/3 -1/3 = 0. And so the neutron is a neutral particle. But the quarks inside still have charge and so they can create a magnetic field. (Technically the neutron is also made up of a sea of quarks and gluons along with the three main ones, but the charges still cancel.)
As an extra point, protons are made up of 2 up quarks and 1 down, which gives us: +2/3 +2/3 -1/3 = +1. So the proton has a positive charge (as we’d expect).
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