Vela Pulsar is located about 1,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Vela.Picture: Reprinted from NASA official website
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Scientists recently detected that the Vela pulsar emitted the highest gamma ray ever recorded. It is estimated that its energy is 10 trillion times that of visible light, equivalent to 20 teraelectronvolts. Its power is so powerful that scientists cannot fully explain it. And if humans are exposed to these gamma rays, they will be burned to coke.
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According to a paper published in the latest issue of Nature Astronomy, these gamma rays come from the Vela pulsar, which is about 1,000 light-years away from the Earth. The pulsar is actually the product of the death process of stars. Stars The core of a supernova will collapse or explode to produce a supernova. When a supernova, as an isolated massive star, reaches the end of its life, the peripheral material will fall back, causing collapse and finally explosion, and a neutron star (pulsar) will be produced in its center. is a rotating neutron star).
Pulsars are extremely dense and compact objects with a diameter of only 20 kilometers that rotate more than 11 times per second, faster than a helicopter rotor. These stellar remnants spin at incredible speeds and possess powerful magnetic fields, making them natural cosmic beacons.
The paper’s author, Arache Djannati-Atai of France’s Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory (APC), said that pulsars are described as the remnants of stars that spectacularly exploded in supernovae, the largest explosions in space.
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Emma de Oña Wilhelmi, a scientist at the High Energy Stereo System (HESS) telescope observatory in Namibia and author of the study, said that these dead stars are almost entirely composed of neutrons and are incredibly dense. One teaspoon of matter has a mass of more than 5 billion tons. .
Artest said that in the “behemoth zoo” of the universe, pulsars are indeed very wonderful celestial objects. As neutron stars, they are in an extremely dense state of matter and have a very strong magnetic field. He said that detecting the phenomena occurring in pulsars and their environment at the energy limit of pulsars will help us improve or even revise theoretical models about the processes and physical conditions of pulsars. It will also allow us to better understand other phenomena. Cosmic accelerator of high-density, highly magnetized objects, such as the magnetosphere of a black hole.
Further reading
High Energy Stereo System (HESS) Telescope Observatory in Namibia.Picture: taken from Wiki
