Astronomers have added a brand new species to the neutron star zoo, showcasing the broad variety among the many compact magnetic stays of useless, once-massive stars.
The newfound extremely magnetic pulsar has a surprisingly lengthy rotation interval, which is difficult the theoretical understanding of those objects, researchers report May 30 in Nature Astronomy. Dubbed PSR J0901-4046, this pulsar sweeps its lighthouse-like radio beam previous Earth about each 76 seconds — 3 times slower than the earlier file holder.
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While it’s an oddball, a few of this newfound pulsar’s traits are frequent amongst its family members. That means this object might assist astronomers higher join the evolutionary phases amongst mysterious species within the neutron star menagerie.
Astronomers know of many sorts of neutron stars. Each one is the compact object left over after a large star’s explosive loss of life, however their traits can fluctuate. A pulsar is a neutron star that astronomers detect at a daily interval due to its cosmic alignment: The star’s sturdy magnetic subject produces beams of radio waves emanating from close to the star’s poles, and each time a kind of beams sweeps throughout Earth, astronomers can see a radio pulse.
The newfound, slowpoke pulsar sits in our galaxy, roughly 1,300 light-years away. Astrophysicist Manisha Caleb of the University of Sydney in Australia and her colleagues discovered it in information from the MeerKAT radio telescope exterior Carnarvon, South Africa.
Further observations with MeerKAT revealed not solely the pulsar’s sluggish, regular radio beat — a measure of how briskly it spins — but in addition one other necessary element: The fee at which the spin slows because the pulsar ages. And these two bits of information revealed one thing odd about this pulsar. According to idea, it shouldn’t be emitting radio waves. And but, it’s.
As neutron stars age, they lose vitality and spin extra slowly. According to calculations, “at some point, they’ve exhausted all their energy, and they cease to emit any sort of emission,” Caleb says. They’ve turn into useless to detectors.
A pulsar’s rotation interval and the slowdown of its spin pertains to the energy of its magnetic subject, which accelerates subatomic particles streaming from the star and, in flip, generates radio waves. Any neutron stars spinning as slowly as PSR J0901-4046 are on this stellar “graveyard” and shouldn’t produce radio alerts.
But “we just keep finding weirder and weirder pulsars that chip away at that understanding,” says astrophysicist Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University in Morgantown, who wasn’t concerned with this work.
The newfound pulsar may very well be its personal distinctive species of neutron star. But in some methods, it additionally seems a bit acquainted, Caleb says. She and her colleagues calculated the pulsar’s magnetic subject from the speed its spin is slowing, and it’s extremely sturdy, just like magnetars (SN: 9/17/02). This hints that PSR J0901-4046 may very well be what’s often known as a “quiescent magnetar,” which is a pulsar with very sturdy magnetic fields that sometimes emits brilliantly energetic bursts of X-rays or different radiation. “We’re going to need either X-ray emission or [ultraviolet] observations to confirm whether it is indeed a magnetar or a pulsar,” she says.
The discovery workforce nonetheless has extra observations to investigate. “We do have a truckload more data on it,” says astrophysicist Ian Heywood of the University of Oxford. The researchers are taking a look at how the article’s brightness is altering over time and whether or not its spin abruptly adjustments, or “glitches.”
The astronomers are also altering their automated pc applications, which scan the radio information and flag intriguing alerts, to search for these longer-duration spin durations — and even weirder and extra mysterious neutron star phenomena. “The sweet thing about astronomy, for me, is what’s out there waiting for us to find,” Heywood says.
