Scientists find strange ring circling dead star

Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have found a bizarre ring of material around the magnetic remains of a star that blasted to smithereens, NASA reported Wednesday.

The stellar corpse, called SGR 1900+14, belongs to a class of objects known as magnetars. These are the cores of massive stars that blew up in supernova explosions, but unlike other dead stars, they slowly pulsate with X-rays and have tremendously strong magnetic fields.

"I was flipping through archived Spitzer data of the object, and that's when I noticed it was surrounded by a ring we'd never seen before," said Stefanie Wachter of NASA's Spitzer Science Center, who found the ring serendipitously. Wachter is lead author of a paper about the findings in this week's Nature.