Wonky, Warped and Weird: Pulsar Vanishes in Spacetime b4in.org/qFA4 For the first time, the mass of a binary pulsar pair has been precisely measured, but it was a race against time before the extreme gravitational warping of spacetime caused one of the dense objects to blip out of view. Pulsars are rapidly-spinning neutron stars that generate powerful beams of radiation from their poles. Neutron stars are the stellar husks of long-dead stars that ran out of hydrogen fuel and collapsed under gravity to create a mass of degenerate matter. VIDEO: What Would Happen if You Fell into a Black Hole? As some neutron stars spin, radiation is generated, particularly in radio wave wavelengths, sweeping past Earth appearing as a flash like a lighthouse. These flashes correspond to the pulsar’s rotational period and they are known to be the most precise timekeepers in the Cosmos. Few binary pulsars have been discovered however, so when astronomers found the pulsar system PSR J1906+0746 (or simply J1906) they knew they had something special. One of the binary pair could be seen, flashing every 144 milliseconds, as its axis of rotation was aligned just right to direct its beam of radio waves toward Earth. Its binary partner, however, is dark, suggesting that if it is indeed a pulsar, its collimated beam is pointed elsewhere. The visible pulsar orbits its binary partner every 4 hours. The study, carried out by an international team of astronomers, is published in The Astrophysical Journal and was presented at the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle on Jan. 8. ANALYSIS: ‘Transformer’ Pulsar is More Than Meets the Eye Since its discovery in 2004 by the Aricebo Observatory, the world’s most sensitive radio antenna located in Puerto Rico, the system has been continuously studied by other powerful observatories — an impressive billion rotations were recorded over a 5 year period. With this wealth of data, astronomers quickly realized that the extreme gravitational environment surrounding the binary pair would soon cause the visible pulsar to vanish. More with live links b4in.org/qFA4
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 06:12:25 +0000
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