Suppose further, that the accretion disk orbiting at the star's equator has a large quantity of matter, or else that there is a nearby giant star whose outer layers are being skimmed off by the neutron star. Eventually, the point will be reached whereat the neutron star cannot resist gravitational collapse into a black hole. A black hole cannot support a magnetic field. Hence, the previous field becomes detached from its source star. The energy of this magnetic field is comparable to a few percent of stellar mass, and the pressure is stupendous. The detached magnetic field expands violently at nearly the speed of light, sweeping before it the particles in the format accretion disk. These particles will be ionized and propelled to giga-electron-volt energies. We call such ionized particles "cosmic rays".
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