Posted on by Fraser Cain

How Fast Can Stars Spin?

How Fast Can Stars Spin?

Everything in the Universe is spinning. Spinning planets and their spinning moons orbit around spinning stars, which orbit spinning galaxies. It’s spinning all the way down.

Consider that fiery ball in the sky, the Sun. Like all stars, our Sun rotates on its axis. You can’t tell because staring at the Sun long enough will permanently damage your eyeballs. Instead you can use a special purpose solar telescope to observe sunspots and other features on the surface of the Sun. And if you track their movements, you’ll see that the Sun’s equator takes 24.47 days to turn once on its axis. Unlike its slower poles which take 26.24 days to turn.

The Sun isn’t a solid ball of rock, it’s a sphere of hot plasma, so the different regions can complete their rotation at different rates. But it rotates so slowly that it’s an almost perfect sphere.

If you were standing on the surface of the Sun, which you can’t, of course, you would be whipping around at 7,000 km/h. That sounds fast, but just you wait.

How does that compare to other stars, and what’s the fastest that a star can spin?

Achenar is located at the lower right of the constellation Eridanus.
Achenar rotates much faster than our Sun. It is located at the lower right of the constellation Eridanus.

A much faster spinning star is Achenar, the tenth brightest star in the sky, located 139 light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus. It has about 7 times the mass of the Sun, but it spins once on its axis every 2 days. If you could see Achenar up close, it would look like a flattened ball. If you measured it from pole to pole, it would be 7.6 Suns across, but if you measured across the equator, it would be 11.6 Suns across.

If you were standing on the surface of Achenar, you’d be hurtling through space at 900,000 km/h.

The very fastest spinning star we know of is the 25 solar mass VFTS 102, located about 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud’s Tarantula Nebula – a factory for massive stars.

If you were standing on the surface of VFTS 102, you’d be moving at 2 million km/h.

In fact, VFTS 102 is spinning so quickly, it can just barely keep itself together. Any faster, and the outward centripetal force would overcome the gravity holding its guts in, and it would tear itself apart. Perhaps that’s why we don’t see any spinning faster; because they couldn’t handle the speed. It appears that this is the fastest that stars can spin.

This is an artist's concept of the fastest rotating star found to date. The massive, bright young star, called VFTS 102, rotates at a million miles per hour, or 100 times faster than our Sun does. Centrifugal forces from this dizzying spin rate have flattened the star into an oblate shape and spun off a disk of hot plasma, seen edge on in this view from a hypothetical planet. The star may have "spun up" by accreting material from a binary companion star. The rapidly evolving companion later exploded as a supernova. The whirling star lies 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)
This is an artist’s concept of VFTS 102, the fastest rotating star found to date. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

One other interesting note about VFTS 102 is that it’s also hurtling through space much faster than the stars around it. Astronomers think it was once in a binary system with a partner that detonated as a supernova, releasing it into space like a catapult.

Not only stars can spin. Dead stars can spin too, and they take this to a whole other level.

Neutron stars are what you get when a star with much more mass than the Sun detonates as a supernova. Suddenly you’ve got a stellar remnant with twice the mass of the Sun compressed down into a tiny ball about 20 km across. All that angular momentum of the star is retained, and so the neutron star spins at an enormous speed.

The fastest neutron star ever recorded spins around 700 times a second. We know it’s turning this quickly because it’s blasting out beams of radiation that sweep towards us like an insane lighthouse. This, of course, is a pulsar, and we did a whole episode on them.

A regular star would be torn apart, but neutron stars have such intense gravity, they can rotate this quickly. Over time, the radiation streaming from the neutron star strips away its angular momentum, and it slows down.

A black hole with an accretion disk. Credit: (NASA/Dana Berry/SkyWorks Digital)

Black holes can spin even faster than that. In fact, when a black hole is actively feeding from a binary companion, or a supermassive black hole is gobbling up stars, it can rotate at nearly the speed of light. The laws of physics prevent anything in the Universe spinning faster than the speed of light, and black holes go right up to the edge of the law without breaking it.

Astronomers recently found a supermassive black hole spinning up to 87% the maximum speed permitted by relativity.

If you were hoping there are antimatter lurking out there, hoarding all that precious future energy, I’m sorry to say, but astronomers have looked and they haven’t found it. Just like the socks in your dryer, we may never discover where it all went.

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

Messier 4 (M4) – The NGC 6121 Globular Cluster

This M4 globular cluster, as imaged by the Wide Field Imager at ESO’s La Silla Observatory. Credit: ESO

During the late 18th century, Charles Messier began to notice that a series of “nebulous” objects in the night sky that he originally mistook for comets. In time, he would notice that they were in fact something significantly different. With the hope of preventing other astronomers from making the same mistake, he began compiling a list of these in what would come to be known as the Messier Catalog.

Consisting of 100 objects, the catalog became an important milestone in both astronomy and the research of Deep Sky objects. Among the many famous objects in this catalog is the M4 loose globular cluster (aka. NGC 6121). Located in the Scorpius (Scorpio) Constellation, this great cluster of ancient stars is one of the closest Messier Objects of its kind to Earth.

Continue reading “Messier 4 (M4) – The NGC 6121 Globular Cluster”

Posted on by Fraser Cain

When Will We Find Another Earth?

When Will We Find Another Earth?

We hear about discoveries of exoplanets every day. So how long will it take us to find another planet like Earth?

Back in the olden days, astronomers could only guess if there were planets orbiting other stars.

These were the days when we had to wait at the bank to pay our bills, nobody carried computers in their pockets and those computers gave direct connections to everyone else’s pockets because pocket connectivity is highly important, school was uphill both ways, the number 6 was brand new, we recorded images on thin sheets of transparent plastic, 5 bees were worth a quarter and I had an onion tied to my belt, as was the style at the time.

With the discovery of a mega Jupiter-sized world orbiting the star 51 Pegasi in 1995, the floodgates opened up. In the years that followed, dozens more planets were discovered. Then hundreds, and now, we know about thousands orbiting other stars.

The bad news is we can’t get to any of them. The good news is most of these worlds suck. You don’t want any part of them. For starters their wifi is terrible.

Consider Kepler-70b. This world orbits its star 4 times in a 24 hour period. This means it’s super close, and a great place to really quickly win all the human torch cosplay competitions. The surface temperature is a completely unreasonable 7200 Kelvin, hotter than the surface temperature of the Sun.

There’s the planets orbiting pulsar PSR B1257+12, a millisecond pulsar in the constellation of Virgo. As they whip around their exotic host, they’re bathed in intense radiation. Which is generally considered bad for creatures who need functioning organs.

Perhaps HD 106906 b, orbiting its star 650 times more distantly than we orbit the Sun. You’d spend every second of your short life on that planet inventing new words for cold. And then you’d die. Cold.

Imagine a world that orbits a star like our Sun. A world made of about an Earth’s worth of rocky material that you could stand on, at just the right distance from its star that water can exist as a liquid.

This is what astronomers search for, the tri-wizard cup of extrasolar planetary research. Earth 2? Terra Nova? The Gaia part le deux.

Here’s the exciting part. Astronomers have found each of these characteristics in a planet, but never all together. They’ve found plenty of stars similar to our Sun, with planets orbiting them. In fact, the star HD 10180 is incredibly similar to the Sun, and astronomers have discovered 9 planets orbiting it so far. Which does have a familiar ring to it. No word so far on which ones are about to be demoted to dwarf planets.

Sizes and temperatures of Kepler discoveries compared to Earth and Jupiter
Sizes and temperatures of Kepler discoveries compared to Earth and Jupiter

They’ve found planets roughly the same mass as the Earth. Kepler-89, with 98% the mass of the Earth. So close! Sadly, it’s way too close to its parent hydrogen furnace to be habitable.

They’ve found planets in the habitable zone. Here on Earth, the global average temperature is -18 degrees C. Sounds cold, but the wintery nights in Antarctica absolutely wreck our GPA.

The closest analog discovered is Kepler-22b, with a global average temperature of -11C. So, it should feel downright balmy. Except, it’s about 2.4 times bigger than Earth and orbits a nasty red dwarf star.

Astronomers have even matched up two criteria at the same time. Earth-sized world orbiting around a Sun-like star, but it’s hellishly hot. Wrong flavor star but with the right temperature and size, it’s a veritable tic tac toe board of near wins.

So far, there hasn’t been a single extrasolar planet discovered that meets all three criteria. An Earth-sized world, orbiting a Sun-like star inside the habitable zone where liquid water could be present.

Astronomers were hoping that NASA’s Kepler spacecraft would have been the first to discover Earth 2.0. It had already turned up thousands of planets, including many of the ones I’ve already mentioned.

Artist's conception of the Kepler Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Artist’s conception of the Kepler Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Sadly, just a few years into the mission, it lost too many reaction wheels, which allow the spacecraft to change direction. It wasn’t able to make enough observations to help confirm a true Earth 2.0. Kepler is still searching for planets, but with a reduced ability to point, it’s only looking at red dwarf stars.

Don’t worry, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite will launch in 2017, and will survey a region of the sky 400 times larger than Kepler did. It should turn up thousands of planets, Earth-sized and larger.

Once we actually find New Terra, things get really interesting. Astronomers will search those planets for life. I know it sounds almost impossible to see life from this distance, but astronomers know that if they can analyze the atmosphere of these worlds, they can detect life flourishing there.

They might even be able to detect the pollution from their alien cars and heavy industry, contributing to their CO2 levels, and learn we’re not so different after all. Even if they’re icky bug people.

At the time I’m recording this video, no analog Earth planet has been discovered so far. But it’s just a matter of time. In the next few decades astronomers are going to find that first Earth 2.0, and then dozens, then hundreds, and even figure out which ones have life on them.

It’s a great time to be alive. Place your bets. Predict the date astronomers announce that we’ll find Earth 2.0. Put your guess into the comments below.

Posted on by Tammy Plotner

Whittling Away At SN1987A

Left Panel: SNR1987A as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010.Middle Panel: SNR1987A as seen by the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) in New South Wales and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. Right Panel: A computer generated visualisation of the remnant showing the possible location of a Pulsar. Credit: ATCA & ALMA Observations & data - G. Zanardo et al. / HST Image: NASA, ESA, K. France (University of Colorado, Boulder), P. Challis and R. Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

A team of Australian astronomers has been busy utilizing some of the world’s leading radio telescopes located in both Australia and Chile to carve away at the layered remains of a relatively new supernova. Designated as SN1987A, the 28 year-old stellar cataclysm came to Southern Hemisphere observer’s attention when it sprang into action at the edge of the Large Magellanic Cloud some two and a half decades ago. Since then, it has provided researchers around the world with a ongoing source of information about one of the Universe’s “most extreme events”.

Representing the University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, PhD Candidate Giovanna Zanardo led the team focusing on the supernova with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) in New South Wales. Their observations took in the wavelengths spanning the radio to the far infrared.

“By combining observations from the two telescopes we’ve been able to distinguish radiation being emitted by the supernova’s expanding shock wave from the radiation caused by dust forming in the inner regions of the remnant,” said Giovanna Zanardo of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Perth, Western Australia.

“This is important because it means we’re able to separate out the different types of emission we’re seeing and look for signs of a new object which may have formed when the star’s core collapsed. It’s like doing a forensic investigation into the death of a star.”

“Our observations with the ATCA and ALMA radio telescopes have shown signs of something never seen before, located at the centre or the remnant. It could be a pulsar wind nebula, driven by the spinning neutron star, or pulsar, which astronomers have been searching for since 1987. It’s amazing that only now, with large telescopes like ALMA and the upgraded ATCA, we can peek through the bulk of debris ejected when the star exploded and see what’s hiding underneath.”

A video compilation showing Supernova Remnant 1987A as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010, and by radio telescopes located in Australia and Chile in 2012. The piece ends with a computer generated visualization of the remnant showing the possible location of a Pulsar. Credit: Dr Toby Potter, ICRAR-UWA, Dr Rick Newton, ICRAR-UWA

But, there is more. Not long ago, researchers published another paper which appeared in the Astrophysical Journal. Here they made an effort to solve another unanswered riddle about SN1987A. Since 1992 the supernova appears to be “brighter” on one side than it does the other! Dr. Toby Potter, another researcher from ICRAR’s UWA node took on this curiosity by creating a three-dimensional simulation of the expanding supernova shockwave.

“By introducing asymmetry into the explosion and adjusting the gas properties of the surrounding environment, we were able to reproduce a number of observed features from the real supernova such as the persistent one-sidedness in the radio images”, said Dr. Toby Potter.

So what’s going on? By creating a model which spans over a length of time, researchers were able to emulate an expanding shock front along the eastern edge of the supernova remnant. This region moves away more quickly than its counterpart and generates more radio emissions. When it encounters the equatorial ring – as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope – the effect becomes even more pronounced.

A visualization showing how Supernova1987A evolves between May of 1989 and July of 2014. Credit: Dr Toby Potter, ICRAR-UWA, Dr Rick Newton, ICRAR-UWA

“Our simulation predicts that over time the faster shock will move beyond the ring first. When this happens, the lop-sidedness of radio asymmetry is expected to be reduced and may even swap sides.”

“The fact that the model matches the observations so well means that we now have a good handle on the physics of the expanding remnant and are beginning to understand the composition of the environment surrounding the supernova – which is a big piece of the puzzle solved in terms of how the remnant of SN1987A formed.”

Original Story Source: Astronomers dissect the aftermath of a Supernova – International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research News Release.

Posted on by Tim Reyes

Nearby Galaxy Holds First Ultraluminous X-Ray Source that is a Pulsar

Artist's illustration of a rotating neutron star, the remnants of a super nova explosion. Credit: NASA, Caltech-JPL

A research team led by Caltech astronomers of Pasadena California have discovered an ultraluminous X-ray (ULX) source that is pulsating. Their analysis concluded that the source in a nearby galaxy – M82 – is from a rotating neutron star, a pulsar. This is the first ULX source attributed to a pulsar.

Matteo Bachetti of the Université de Toulouse in France first identified the pulsating source and is the lead author of the paper, “An ultraluminous X-ray source powered by an accreting neutron star” in the journal Nature. Caltech astronomer Dr. Fiona Harrison, the team leader, stated “This compact little stellar remnant is a real powerhouse. We’ve never seen anything quite like it. We all thought an object with that much energy had to be a black hole.”

What is most extraordinary is that this discovery places even more strain on theories already hard pressed to explain the existence of ultraluminous X-Ray sources. The burden falls on the shoulder of the theorists.

The NuStar Space Telescope launched into Earth orbit by a Orbital Science Corp. Pegasus rocket, 2012. The Wolter telescope design images throughout a spectral range from 5 to 80 KeV. (Credit: NASA/Caltech-JPL)
The NuStar Space Telescope launched into Earth orbit by a Orbital Science Corp. Pegasus rocket, 2012. The Wolter telescope design images throughout a spectral range from 5 to 80 KeV. (Credit: NASA/Caltech-JPL)

The source of the observations is the NuSTAR space telescope, a SMEX class NASA mission. It is a Wolter telescope that uses grazing incidence optics, not glass (refraction) or mirrors (reflection) as in visible light telescopes. The incidence angle of the X-rays must be very shallow and consequently the optics are extended out on a 10 meter (33 feet) truss. NuSTAR records its observations with a time stamp such as taking a video of the sky. The video recording in high speed is not in visible everyday light but what is called hard x-rays. Only gamma rays are more energetic. X-rays emanate from the most powerful sources and events in the Universe. NuStar observes in the energy range of X-Rays from 5 to 80 KeV (electron volt)while the famous Chandra space telescope observes in the .1 to 10 KeV range. Chandra is one NASA’s great space telescope, was launched by the Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-93) in 1999. Chandra has altered our view of the Universe as dramatically as the first telescope constructed by Galileo. NuSTAR carries on the study of X-rays to higher energies and with greater acuity.

ULX sources are rare in the Universe but this is the first pulsating ULX. After analysis, they concluded that this is not a black hole but rather its little brother, a spinning neutron star as the source. More specifically, this is an accreting binary pulsar; matter from a companion star is being  gravitationally attracted by and accreting onto the pulsar.

The Crab Nebula Pulsar, M1. Both are sequences of observations that show the expansion of shock waves emanating from the Pulsar interacting with the surrounding nebula. The Crab Pulsar actually pulsates 30 times per second a result of its rotation rate and the relative offset of the magnetic pole. Charndra X-Rays (left), Hubble Visible light (right). (Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech)
The prime example of a pulsar – the Crab Nebula Pulsar, M1. These actual observations show the expansion of shock waves emanating from the Pulsar interacting with the surrounding nebula. The Crab Pulsar actually pulsates 30 times per second, not seen here, a result of its rotation rate and the relative offset of the magnetic pole. Charndra X-Rays (left), Hubble Visible light (right). (Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech)

Take a neutron star and spin it up to anywhere from 700 rotations per second to a mere one  rotation every 10 seconds. Now you have a neutron star called a pulsar. Spinning or not, these are the remnants of supernovae, stellar explosions that can outshine a galaxy of 300 billion stars. Just one teaspoon of neutron star material weighs 10 million tons (9,071,847,400 kg). That is the same weight as 900 Great Pyramids of Giza all condensed to one teaspoon. As incredible a material and star that a neutron star is, they were not thought to be the source of any ultraluminous X-Ray sources. This view has changed with the analysis of observations by this research team utilizing NuSTAR. The telescope name – NuSTAR – stands for Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array.

There is nothing run of the mill about black holes. Dr. Stephen Hawking only conceded after 25 years, in 2004 (the Thorne-Hawking Bet)  that Black Holes exist. And still today it is not absolutely certain. Recall the Universe Today weekly – Space Hangout on September 26 – “Do Black Holes exist?” and the article by Jason Major, “There are no such things as Black Holes.”

Pulsars stars are nearly as exotic as black holes, and all astronomers accept the existence of these spinning neutron stars. There are three final states of a dying star. Stars like our Sun at the end of their life become very dense White Dwarf stars, about the size of the Earth. Neutron stars are the next “degenerate” state of a dying exhausted star. All the electrons have merged with the protons in the material of the star to become neutrons. A neutron star is a degenerate form of matter effectively made up of all neutron particles. Very dense, these stars are really small, the size of cities, about 16 miles in diameter. The third type of star in its final state is the Black Hole.

The Crab Nebula was first observed in the 1700s and is catalogued Messier object, M1. The remant explosion of a SuperNova, Chinese astronomers observed in 1054 A.D and holds the second Pular discovered (1968).
The Crab Nebula was first observed in the 1700s and is catalogued Messier object, M1. The remant explosion of a SuperNova that Chinese astronomers observed in 1054 A.D, it holds the second Pulsar discovered (1968).

A spinning neutron star creates a magnetic field, the most powerful of such fields in the Universe. They are like a dipole of a bar magnet and because of how magnetic fields confine the hot gases – plasma – of the neutron star, constant streams of material flow down and light streams out from the magnetic poles.

Recently, the Earth has had incredible northern lights, aurora. These lights are also from hot gases — a plasma — at the top of our atmosphere. Likewise, hot energetic particles from the Sun are funneled down into the magnetic poles of the Earth’s field that creates the northern lights. For spinning neutron stars – pulsars – the extreme light from the magnetic poles are like beacons. Just like our Earth, the magnetic poles and the spin axis poles do not coincide. So the intense beacon of light will rotate around and periodically point at the Earth. The video of the first illustration describes this action.

Messier object - M82, the Cigar Nebula, nicknamed for the shape seen through telescopes of the 1800s. This is the location of the newly discovered Pulsar.
Messier object – M82, the Cigar Nebula, nicknamed for the shape seen through telescopes of the 1800s. This is the location of the newly discovered Pulsar.

The light beacons from pulsars are very bright but theory, until now, has been supported by observations. No ultraluminous X-ray sources should be pulsars. The newly discovered pulsar is outputting 100 times more energy than any other. Discoveries like the one by these astronomers utilizing NuSTAR is proof that there remains more to discover and understand and new telescopes will be conceived to help resolve questions raised by NuSTAR or Chandra.

Further reading: JPL

Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

Split-Personality Pulsar Switches From Radio To Gamma-Rays

Artist's conception of pulsar J1023 before (top) and after the radio beacon (visible in green) disappeared. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Another snapshot of our strange universe: astronomers recently caught a pulsar — a particular kind of dense star — switch off its radio beacon while powerful gamma rays brightened fivefold.

“It’s almost as if someone flipped a switch, morphing the system from a lower-energy state to a higher-energy one,” stated lead researcher Benjamin Stappers, an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester, England.

“The change appears to reflect an erratic interaction between the pulsar and its companion, one that allows us an opportunity to explore a rare transitional phase in the life of this binary.”

The binary system includes pulsar J1023+0038 and another star that has a fifth of the mass of the sun. They’re close orbiting, spinning around each other every 4.8 hours. This means the companion’s days are numbered, because the pulsar is pulling it apart.

In NASA’s words, here is what is going on:

In J1023, the stars are close enough that a stream of gas flows from the sun-like star toward the pulsar. The pulsar’s rapid rotation and intense magnetic field are responsible for both the radio beam and its powerful pulsar wind. When the radio beam is detectable, the pulsar wind holds back the companion’s gas stream, preventing it from approaching too closely. But now and then the stream surges, pushing its way closer to the pulsar and establishing an accretion disk.

Gas in the disk becomes compressed and heated, reaching temperatures hot enough to emit X-rays. Next, material along the inner edge of the disk quickly loses orbital energy and descends toward the pulsar. When it falls to an altitude of about 50 miles (80 km), processes involved in creating the radio beam are either shut down or, more likely, obscured.

The inner edge of the disk probably fluctuates considerably at this altitude. Some of it may become accelerated outward at nearly the speed of light, forming dual particle jets firing in opposite directions — a phenomenon more typically associated with accreting black holes. Shock waves within and along the periphery of these jets are a likely source of the bright gamma-ray emission detected by Fermi.

You can read more about the research in the Astrophysical Journal or in preprint version on Arxiv.

Source: NASA

Posted on by Shannon Hall

An Earth-size Diamond in the Sky: The Coolest Known White Dwarf Detected

Artist impression of a white dwarf star in orbit with pulsar PSR J2222-0137. It may be the coolest and dimmest white dwarf ever identified. Credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

We live in a vast, dark Universe, which makes the smallest and coolest objects extremely difficult to detect, save for a stroke of luck. Often times this luck comes in the form of a companion. Take, for example, the first exoplanet detected due to its orbit around a pulsar — a rapidly spinning neutron star.

A team of researchers using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Green Bank Telescope and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), as well as other observatories have repeated the story, detecting an object in orbit around a distant pulsar. Except this time it’s the coldest, faintest white dwarf ever detected. So cool, in fact, its carbon has crystallized.

The punch line is this: with the help of a pulsar, astronomers have detected an Earth-size diamond in the sky.

“It’s a really remarkable object,” said lead author David Kaplan from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in a press release. “These things should be out there, but because they are so dim they are very hard to find.”

The story begins when Dr. Jason Boyles, then a graduate student at West Virginia University, identified a pulsar, dubbed PSR J2222-0127, 900 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius.

When the core of a massive star runs out of energy, it collapses to form an incredibly dense neutron star or black hole. Bring a teaspoon of neutron star to Earth and it would outweigh Mount Everest at about a billion tons. A pulsar is simply a spinning neutron star.

But as a pulsar spins, lighthouse-like beams of radio waves stream from the poles of its powerful magnetic field. If they sweep past the Earth, they’ll give rise to blips of radio waves, so regular that you could set your watch by them. But if the pulsar carries a companion in tow, the tiny gravitational tugs can offset that timing slightly.

The first observations of PSR J2222-0137 identified that it was spinning more than 30 times each second. It was then observed over a two-year period with the VLBA. By applying Einstein’s theory of relativity — which predicts that light slows in the presence of a gravitational field — the researchers studied how the gravity of the companion warped space, causing delays in the radio signal as the pulsar passed behind it.

The delayed travel times helped the researchers determine the individual masses of the two stars. The pulsar has a mass of 1.2 times that of the Sun and the companion a mass 1.05 times that of the Sun. Previously, researchers had thought the companion was likely another neutron star, or a white dwarf, the remnant of a Sun-like star.

But the timing variations made the neutron star scenario unlikely. The orbits were too orderly for a second supernova to have taken place. So knowing the typical brightness of a white dwarf and its distance, astronomers initially thought they would be able to detect the elusive companion in optical and infrared light.

An image taken in visible light at the SOAR telescope of the field of the pulsar/white dwarf pair. There is no evidence for the white dwarf at the position of the pulsar in this deep image, indicating that the white dwarf is much fainter, and therefore cooler, than any such known object. (The two large white circles mask bright, overexposed stars.)
An image taken in visible light at the SOAR telescope of the field of the pulsar/white dwarf pair. The exact location of the white dwarf is known to a pixel. But it’s not there. Image Credit: NOAO

However, neither the Southern Astrophysical Research telescope in Chile nor the 10-meter Keck telescope in Hawaii was able to detect it.

“Our final image should show us a companion 100 times fainter than any other white dwarf orbiting a neutron star and about 10 times fainter than any known white dwarf, but we don’t see a thing,” said coauthor Bart Dunlap, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina. “If there’s a white dwarf there, and there almost certainly is, it must be extremely cold.”

The research team calculated that the white dwarf would be no more than 3,000 degrees Kelvin. At such a low temperature, the collapsed star would be largely crystallized carbon, similar to diamond.

The paper has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and may be viewed here.

Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

Spin! Crab Pulsar Speed Jumps Linked To Billions Of Tiny Vortices

Artist's conception of a gamma-ray pulsar. Gamma rays are shown in purple, and radio radiation in green. Credit: NASA/Fermi/Cruz de Wilde

Pulsars — those supernova leftovers that are incredibly dense and spin very fast — may change their speed due to activity of billions of vortices in the fluid beneath their surface, a new study says.

The work is based on a combination of research and modelling and looks at the Crab Nebula pulsar, which has periodic slowdowns in its rotation of at least 0.055 nanoseconds. Occasionally, the Crab and other pulsars see their spins speed up in an event called a “glitch”. Luckily for astronomers, there is a wealth of data on Crab because the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the United Kingdom looked at it almost daily for the last 29 years.

A glitch, the astronomers said in a statement, is “caused by the unpinning and displacement of vortices that connect the [pulsar’s] crust with the mixture of particles containing superfluid neutrons beneath the crust.”

“Surprisingly, no one tried to determine a lower limit to glitch size before. Many assumed that the smallest glitch would be caused by a single vortex unpinning. The smallest glitch is clearly much larger than we expected,” stated Danai Antonopoulou from the University of Amsterdam.

The astronomers added they will need more observations of other pulsars to better understand the results.

You can read the paper at the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society or in preprint version on Arxiv. The research was led by C.M. Espinoza of the University of Manchester and Chile’s Pontifical Catholic University.

Source: NOVA

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Runaway Pulsar Produces Longest Jet Trail Ever Observed

An extraordinary jet trailing behind a runaway pulsar is seen in this composite image. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/ISDC/L.Pavan et al, Radio: CSIRO/ATNF/ATCA Optical: 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF

One of the fastest-moving pulsars ever observed is spewing out a record-breaking jet of high-energy particles that stretches 37 light years in length – the longest object in the Milky Way galaxy.

“We’ve never seen an object that moves this fast and also produces a jet,” said Lucia Pavan of the University of Geneva in Switzerland and lead author of a paper analyzing the object. “By comparison, this jet is almost 10 times longer than the distance between the sun and our nearest star.”

The pulsar, a type of neutron star, is has the official moniker of IGR J11014-6103, but is also known as the “Lighthouse nebula.” Astronomers say the pulsar’s corkscrew-like trajectory can likely be traced back to its birth in the collapse and subsequent explosion of a massive star. The curly-cue pattern in the trail suggests the pulsar is wobbling like a spinning top.

The team says that their findings suggest that “jets are common to rotation-powered pulsars, and demonstrate that supernovae can impart high kick velocities to misaligned spinning neutron stars, possibly through distinct, exotic, core-collapse mechanisms.”

The object was first seen by the European Space Agency satellite INTEGRAL. The pulsar is located about 60 light-years away from the center of the supernova remnant SNR MSH 11-61A in the constellation of Carina. Its implied speed is between 4 – 8 million km/hr (2.5 million and 5 million mph), making it one of the fastest pulsars ever observed.

IGR J11014-6103 also is producing a cocoon of high-energy particles that enshrouds and trails behind it in a comet-like tail. This structure, called a pulsar wind nebula, has been observed before, but the Chandra data show the long jet and the pulsar wind nebula are almost perpendicular to one another.

Usually, the spin axis and jets of a pulsar point in the same direction as they are moving.

“We can see this pulsar is moving directly away from the center of the supernova remnant based on the shape and direction of the pulsar wind nebula,” said co-author Pol Bordas, from the University of Tuebingen in Germany. “The question is, why is the jet pointing off in this other direction?”

One possibility requires an extremely fast rotation speed for the iron core of the star that exploded. A problem with this scenario is that such fast speeds are not commonly expected to be achievable.

“With the pulsar moving one way and the jet going another, this gives us clues that exotic physics can occur when some stars collapse,” said co-author Gerd Puehlhofer also of the University of Tuebingen.

Read the team’s paper.

Source: Chandra