Astronomers see star turn into pulsar

William Atkins
Friday, 22 May 2009 18:35

Science - Space

The team, headed by Anne Archibald and Victoria Kaspi, of the McGill Pulsar Group at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, made their discovery (pdf file showing initial request for telescope time) with telescopes located in the United States, Australia, and the Netherlands.

CSIRO states, “PSR J1023+0038 was found in a 2007 observation with the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) during a survey led by NRAO and West Virginia University.”

And, “CSIRO’s Parkes telescope was used to get the first full-orbit observations of the pulsar, which helped to characterise the pulsar’s properties.”

The scientists also used the Westerbork radio telescope in the Netherlands and the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

One of the researchers, David Champion, of CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility, stated, “This object, called PSR J1023+0038, is a millisecond pulsar, a condensed star about the size of a major city.” He added, “It’s now revolving at 592 times a second, which means it’s one of the fastest spinning objects we know.” [CSIRO]

The Archibald-Kaspi team states that PSR J1023+0038 is about 4,000 light-years from Earth, within the constellation Sextans.

This discovery provides a first chance for astronomers to see how a millisecond pulsar evolves, and it important to finding more answers to the continuing evolution of the Universe.