Tagged: Pulsar

A single flash from the sky pointed the way to a bizarre star that rotates very slowly, making it difficult to figure out if it’s a pulsar or some other stellar object. The object, known as PSR J0901-4046, “challenges our current understanding of how these...

Thursday, July 22, 2021: NASA’s X-ray space telescope Chandra has obtained new images of the brightest pulsar in the sky. The M82 X-2 pulsar, a fast spinning neutron star, is located in the galaxy Messier 82 some 12 million light-years from Earth. M82 X-2’s brightness varies...

These “cosmic clocks” can help researchers answer big questions in physics.   An international team of astronomers has discovered eight rare millisecond pulsars hiding inside dense clusters of stars surrounding the Milky Way. A pulsar is a neutron star — city-sized stellar objects packed with...

Faced with the tragic loss of the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico and the often prohibitive cost of satellite missions, astronomers are searching for savvy alternatives to continue answering fundamental questions in physics. At a press conference during the 2021 APS April Meeting, they will...

An international team of astronomers has carried out X-ray observations of a massive millisecond pulsar known as PSR J0740+6620. Results of the observational campaign, presented in a paper published May 14 on the arXiv pre-print repository, deliver important information regarding the properties of this pulsar....

Using ESA’s XMM-Newton spacecraft, an international team of astronomers has detected a new energetic rotation-powered pulsar in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The newly found pulsar, designated PSR J0058–7218, appears to be the most energetic pulsar so far discovered in the SMC. The finding is...

A distant globular cluster that’s home to dozens of fast-rotating stars could provide new clues about the formation of the Milky Way and the gas halo that surrounds the galaxy. The globular cluster, known as 47 Tucanae or 47 Tuc, is a dense collection of...

China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) has uncovered the first known pulsar in Messier 92, a globular star cluster roughly 27,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Hercules. The swiftly spinning and pulsating object, which goes by two names — PSR J1717+4307A and...

You can’t rush the universe. You definitely can’t rush a superdense star as it gobbles up bites of a neighbor for nearly two weeks before shooting off a burst of X-rays thousands of times brighter than our sun. But thanks to some lucky timing, that...

More antimatter particles stream toward Earth than scientists can explain — and new research from a mountaintop observatory in central Mexico deepens the mystery by crossing off one possible source. The Earth is constantly showered by high-energy particles from a variety of cosmic sources. Physicist...