Our understanding of star systems is being changed by the discovery of a neutron star.
My colleagues and I made the discovery when we were looking at the Vela-X 1 region of the Milky Way using a radio telescope in South Africa. We saw a flash that lasted about 300 milliseconds.
The flash was similar to a radio-emitting star. This was not like anything we had seen before.
We searched through old data in hopes of finding a similar pulse. We were able to identify more of the previously missed pulse thanks to our real-time pulse detection system.
A quick analysis of the times of arrival of the pulse showed that they were repeating about every 76 seconds.
Some of the characteristics of apulsar ormagnetar were shown by our observation. The dense remnants of collapsed giant stars emit radio waves from their poles.
The radio waves can be measured from Earth, like how a lighthouse flashes in the distance.
We might have found a completely new class of radio-emitting object, because the longest known rotation period for a pulsar before this was 23.5 seconds. Nature Astronomy publishes our findings today.
We were able to locate the object with excellent accuracy thanks to the data we were able to get from the projects. We carried out more sensitive follow-up observations after this.
The object, named PSR J0941-4046, is a radio-emitting star which rotates extremely slowly compared to other pulsars. We were able to predict the arrival time of each pulse to a 100 millionth of a second because of the consistency of the pulse rates.
The unique thing about PSR J0941-5046 is that it is located in the graveyard of a star. The region of space where we don't expect to detect any radio emissions is believed to be the end of the life cycle of the neutron stars.
Our understanding of how neutron stars are born and evolve is challenged by PSR.
It appears to produce at least seven distinctly different pulse shapes, which is interesting as most neutron stars don't. The object's physical emission mechanism is likely to be related to the diversity in pulse shape and intensity.
One particular type of pulse shows a strongly quasi-periodic structure, which suggests that something is driving the radio emission. The inner workings of PSR J0941-4046 may be provided with valuable information by these pulses.
Fast radio bursts are short radio bursts of unknown origin. It is not yet clear if PSR J0941-4046 emits the kind of energies observed in fast radio bursts. It could be that it is an ultra-long period magnetar.
Only a few Magnetars emit radio waves in the radio part of the spectrum. The ultra-long period magnetar is thought to be a source of fast radio bursts.
Since radio surveys don't usually search for periods this long, it's not clear how long PSR J0941-5046 has been active.
We don't know how many of these sources exist. We can only detect radio emissions for a small portion of the rotation period, so they are only visible for a short time. We were able to spot it in the beginning.
It's difficult to detect similar sources and there may be a larger undetected population waiting to be discovered. There is a possibility of a new class of radio Transient: the ultra-long period neutron star.
Future searches for similar objects will be crucial to our understanding of the neutron star population.
The lecturer is from the University of Sydney.
This article is free to use under a Creative Commons license. The original article is worth a read.
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