Magnetars
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How it came to be
On March 5, 1979, a few months after we successfully dropped satellites into the atmosphere of Venus, the two Soviet spacecraft that were then drifting through the Solar System were hit by a blast of gamma radiation at approximately 10:51 EST. This burst of gamma rays quickly continued to spread. Eleven seconds later, Helios 2, which was a NASA probe in orbit around the Sun, was saturated by the blast of radiation. It soon hit Venus, and the Pioneer Venus Orbiter's detectors were overcome by the wave. Seconds later, Earth received the wave of radiation, where the powerful output of gamma rays overran the detectors of two United States defense satellites, the Soviet Prognoz 7 satellite, and the Einstein Observatory. Just before the wave exited our Solar System, the blast also hit the International Sun-Earth Explorer. This extremely powerful blast of gamma radiation constituted the strongest wave of extra-solar gamma rays ever detected; it was over 100 times more intense than any known previous extra-solar burst. Because gamma rays travel at the speed of light and the time of the pulse was recorded by several distant spacecraft as well as on Earth, the source of the gamma radiation could be calculated to an accuracy of about 2 arc-seconds. The direction of the source corresponded with the remnants of a star that had gone supernova around 3000 B.C.E.