SPACE — Astronomers have discovered a new star rotating rapidly across the universe. It is so fast, it is capable of whizzing 14 times per second at a speed of millions of miles per hour.
The fast-spinning pulsar core of the dead star also blows out a powerful wind of particles, creating what is called a pulsar wind nebula. A team of scientists discovered it using Australia’s Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and Parkes radio telescope, as well as South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope.
The nebula or gas cloud is about 33,000 light years from Earth. Viewed through radio waves, it is about 69 light years across, but only a tenth of that size when viewed with X-rays.
Even though it is 46 times larger than the solar system, the team behind the discovery named it “Potoroo”. Taken from the name of a small marsupial animal originating from Australia.
Like all neutron stars, the pulsar that powers Potoroo is named PSR J1638–4713. It is born when a massive star runs out of fuel for nuclear fusion in its core. Exhaustion of fusion stops the flow of energy to counteract its own gravitational pull for millions or billions of years.
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Eventually, the star collapses, leaving behind a very dense stellar core. It is so dense that one spoonful of the material weighs around 1 billion tons.
Meanwhile, the outer layer of the star is torn apart by a devastating supernova explosion. The highly magnetic neutron star spins rapidly and emits radiation that periodically sweeps across space, like a cosmic beacon surrounded by a gradually spreading shell of supernova cooling matter.
Winds from pulsars blow charged particles that collide with scattered material, forming pulsar wind nebulae. The particles in the nebula continue to lose energy as they move away from the center of the neutron star.
Therefore, studying the light emitted from pulsar wind nebulae could reveal important information about how particles move in the often turbulent environment around neutron stars. The team behind the Potoroo discovery saw the nebula as shaped like a comet, with a solid central core followed by a bright tail.
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PSR J1638–4713, spins so fast that it completes about 14 full revolutions every second. Its age is believed to be very young for a celestial body, namely 24,000 years. For comparison, the solar system is about 4.5 billion years old.
The results of the research have been accepted for publication in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. However, a previously reviewed version has been published on the paper repository site arXiv. Source: Space.com
2024-01-03 05:37:00
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