William Atkins
Friday, 22 May 2009 19:35
Science -
Space
Page 1 of 3
An international team of astronomers has observed for the first time a star being turned into a very fast rotating neutron star, what is called a millisecond pulsar. This discovery helps to find answers to how such massive stars evolve later in their lives.
The paper “
A Radio Pulsar/X-ray Binary Link” was published online on May 21, 2009 in
Science Express (DOI: 10.1126/science.1172740), part of Science magazine. Team members are from Canada, Australia, Russia, the Netherlands, and the United States.
Its authors are
Anne M. Archibald, Ingrid H. Stairs, Scott M. Ransom,
Victoria M. Kaspi, Vladislav I. Kondratiev, Duncan R. Lorimer, Maura A. McLaughlin, Jason Boyles, Jason W. T. Hessels, Ryan Lynch, Joeri van Leeuwen, Mallory S. E. Roberts, Frederick Jenet, David J. Champion, Rachel Rosen, Brad N. Barlow, Bart H. Dunlap, and Ronald A. Remillard.
According to the CSIRO media release, “
Astronomers catch a star being revved-up,” an international team of astronomers observed a star being transformed into a millisecond pulsar, which spins at nearly 600 revolutions per second.
Check out the CSIRO article for animation of the millisecond pulsar and its companion star.
Such pulsars are super-dense neutron stars; that is, the leftover of a massive star that has exploded and then condensed into a very dense core. In fact, the CSIRO article states,
“A teaspoon of neutron-star material has a mass of about a billion tonnes.”
And, this pulsar is a special type of pulsar called a millisecond pulsar because it rotates at hundreds of times per second. Most pulsars rotate at only tens of times per second.
In the past, astronomers thought millisecond pulsars were just ordinary pulsars that had been forced to spin faster by the addition of material from a companion star, while it orbits close by.
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