The sweeping beams of cosmic lighthouses called pulsars are much more energetic than previously thought, calling into question the bulbs that power them.
The observation is “spectacular,” says Hayk Hakobyan, an astrophysicist at Columbia University who was not part of the study. “This is basically a stress test for our theories.”
Pulsars are the dense remnants of exploded stars, emitting beams of light as they twirl up to hundreds of times a second. Pulsars were first discovered in the late 1960s, from a throb of radio waves so consistent that some suggested it was an alien broadcast (SN: 3/8/18).
As a pulsar rotates, its massive magnetic field rips charged particles from the surface, ejecting them along magnetic field lines and spitting radiation out the pulsar’s poles. Over the decades, scientists have found pulsars that beam radiation at higher energies, topping off at about a trillion electron volts, as observed in the Crab pulsar in 2016.
2023-10-06 06:00:00
Original from www.sciencenews.org