The brightest ever pulsar has been found inside a globular cluster of galaxies, comprising thousands or perhaps millions of stars held together by mutual gravity, orbiting our own Milky Way galaxy.
Pulsars are rapidly spinning stars only around 20 kilometers (12 miles) wide that send out powerful radio wave beams, and sometimes X-ray and gamma ray pulsations.
Rotating every 1 to 10 milliseconds, millisecond pulsars (MSPs) are a type of neutron stars believed to have absorbed matter from a binary companion, although around 30 percent of them are solitary.
Referred to as J1823-3021A, this MSP is the youngest known pulsar with the largest magnetic field.
It is located in the constellation Sagittarius about 27,000 light-years away, and was discovered using the Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
“It’s amazing that all of the gamma rays we see from this cluster are coming from a single object,” said study lead author Paulo Freire at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in a press release.
“It must have formed recently based on how rapidly it’s emitting energy. It’s a bit like finding a screaming baby in a quiet retirement home.”
Initially, the astronomers thought that the intense gamma radiation in the globular cluster NGC 6624 was due to an entire population of millisecond pulsars which had been detected previously at radio wavelengths.
However, LAT revealed that the powerful emission was primarily due to this extreme pulsar alone.
These findings imply that such MSPs may exist and could be forming in globular clusters at comparable rates to other MSPs.
Pulsars are rapidly spinning stars only around 20 kilometers (12 miles) wide that send out powerful radio wave beams, and sometimes X-ray and gamma ray pulsations.
Rotating every 1 to 10 milliseconds, millisecond pulsars (MSPs) are a type of neutron stars believed to have absorbed matter from a binary companion, although around 30 percent of them are solitary.
Referred to as J1823-3021A, this MSP is the youngest known pulsar with the largest magnetic field.
It is located in the constellation Sagittarius about 27,000 light-years away, and was discovered using the Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
“It’s amazing that all of the gamma rays we see from this cluster are coming from a single object,” said study lead author Paulo Freire at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in a press release.
“It must have formed recently based on how rapidly it’s emitting energy. It’s a bit like finding a screaming baby in a quiet retirement home.”
Initially, the astronomers thought that the intense gamma radiation in the globular cluster NGC 6624 was due to an entire population of millisecond pulsars which had been detected previously at radio wavelengths.
However, LAT revealed that the powerful emission was primarily due to this extreme pulsar alone.
These findings imply that such MSPs may exist and could be forming in globular clusters at comparable rates to other MSPs.
