Astronomic Breakthrough Is Excuse Enough To Post Pulsar Videos
Posted by LaraHeintz on Friday, Feb 03, 2012
There’s nothing like a few well-placed videos of millisecond pulsars to remind you that sometimes space can make you feel like you’ve somehow been transported to a Led Zepplin laser light show. Sure, millisecond pulsars, which are rapidly spinning neutron stars made of densely packed neutron material left over after a supernova explodes, have been around and studied by astrophysicists for years. But now one researcher in Germany may have found what makes these clusters of energy slow down over time, something that’s confounded scientists for some time.
Normally millisecond pulsars spin at 100 to 1,000 rotations per second, forming high density neutron clusters in which a cluster the size of a sugar cube can hold as much matter as a 100,000 ton mountain, while emitting gamma ray bursts as they turn. But scientists have had trouble defining the cycles of how these dead stars spin, like how fast and for how long. However, a new study, by Thomas Tauris at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and the Argelander Institute for Astronomy in Bonn, Germany may help shed some light on this. Pulsars gain energy as they accrue mass from other stars, and Tauris believes that these pulsars lose about half their energy during the final stages of matter transfer, before radio signals are emitted. As Tauris recently said, "We have now, for the first time, combined detailed numerical stellar evolution models with calculations of the braking torque acting on the spinning pulsar. The result is that the millisecond pulsars loose about half of their rotational energy in the so-called Roche-lobe decoupling phase.”
In other words, Tauris’s study reveals that there may be a transitional phase for pulsars, some of which are believed to be older than the universe itself, between the time they accumulate matter from their donor stars and emit x-ray pulses to the the time when they’re emitting radio waves.
Really, this is just an excuse to post a bunch of videos documenting the dazzling phenomena of these stars that once went supernova, which are hypnotizing in their own right. So sit back, take a couple moments to watch some dead stars, and enjoy. Please note that the jams from the iTunes “Ambient Sound Library” are not a part of the pulsar process.
NASA released this animation in November, 2011 of J1823-3021A, the fastest spinning and brightest millisecond pulsar ever recorded. It is located inside a conglomeration of stars called a globular cluster about 27,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagitarrius.
This pulsar was discovered by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The pulsar was formed 10,000 years ago, and emits 1,000 times the energy of our sun.
PSR J0737-3039 is currently the only known double pulsar in existence. It was discovered in 2003 by a team led by radio astronomer, Marta Burgay, during a high-latitude pulsar survey at Australia’s Parkes Observatory.
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