PTI
Birmingham (England), 29 October
All stars, including the Sun, have a limited life.
Stars glow through a nuclear fusion process in which lighter atoms such as hydrogen come together to form heavier atoms. This process releases a large amount of energy that opposes the constant pull from within the star’s gravity. Ultimately, the merger helps the star resist gravitational collapse.
This balance of forces is called “hydrostatic balance”. However, the time will come when the fuel supply to the star’s core will begin to run out and eventually die.
Stars with a mass greater than eight times the mass of the Sun usually burn with their fuel in less than 100 million years. Once the fusion stops, the star collapses, causing a large and momentary explosion of nuclear fusion that causes the star to explode like a supernova.
A supernova releases enough energy to overtake the galaxy it is in. What remains after the collapse is the core of a dead star called a neutron star or, if the previous star was massive enough, a black hole.
Any planet orbiting a star will perish when it transforms into a supernova. But mysteriously, several “zombie planets” have been found orbiting neutron stars. They are one of the strangest worlds in the universe.
Neutron stars are very dense and contain the same mass as the Sun in a sphere a few miles away. Several neutron stars emit radio waves into space and planets have been found around these “pulsating” stars.
As the pulsar spins, its radio beam travels through space to produce normal radio bursts. Pulsar was invented in 1967: here you can listen to radio broadcasts of several.
The regularity of these radio pulses makes pulsars ideal for searching for nearby planets. If the pulsar had a planet, they would both be orbiting at the same center of gravity. This means that radio emissions will be periodically stretched and compressed in predictable ways, allowing us to find the planet.
Phobetor, Draugr, dan Poltergeist
PSR B1257 + 12 is located approximately 2,300 light years from Earth. It flashes 161 times per second and is nicknamed “Lish” in honor of the undead creature in Western folklore. It is orbited by three rocky terrestrial planets called Phobetor, Draugr, and Poltergeist.
These planets have a special place in the history of astronomy, as they were the first outside our solar system (exoplanets) to be discovered in 1991. A few years ago, NASA published a poster of the “world of zombies for them. “:
Their discovery challenges the idea of planet formation, which usually occurs in the form of new stars. Instead, these planets must have formed after a supernova from a dying star.
It is not known exactly how this happened. The material in the debris disk orbiting the pulsar may have melted into a post-supernova planet.
The Draugr, named after an undead creature in Norse mythology, is the deepest of the three. It has twice the mass of the Moon and is the lowest-mass planet currently known, orbiting Leach every 25 days. Its larger cousins, Poltergeist and Phobetor, orbit every 67 and 98 days, respectively, and are about four times the mass of the Earth, respectively.
The pulsar contains a strong magnetic field that allows an electric current to flow through the space between the pulsar and the orbiting planet. Therefore, if any of these planets had an atmosphere, they could be constantly bathed in the mysterious light of the mighty Northern Lights (similar to our Northern Lights).
If you stand on the surface of one of these zombie worlds, you will see, through the intense color of the Northern Lights, a Lich shining in the sky projecting two strong and tightly controlled beams of light outwards in opposite directions in the darkness. room.
Neutron stars can be very hot, taking residual heat away from supernovae. Lich has a temperature of nearly 30,000 degrees Celsius, and the temperature of Lich in the depths of this world, Draugr, is probably only a few degrees below zero on its surface.
world of diamonds
Planet PSR J1719-1438b orbits a pulsar about 4,000 light-years away and orbits its host in just two hours.
It is the densest planet ever discovered, so dense that it is thought to be made primarily of diamonds.
This “world of diamonds” is the remaining core of a dead star called a white dwarf. This dwarf is known to have a high carbon content (diamonds are made of carbon), but this white dwarf has lost 99.9 percent of its original mass, consumed by the strong gravity of a nearby pulsar.
This diamond sphere is about half the size of Jupiter and orbits PSR J1719-1438 at a distance of 600,000 km (only 1.5 times the Moon is farther from Earth). At such a distance from the host pulsar, this world would likely have a very hot surface.
Metusala
Orbiting the Milky Way (and its many galaxies) are globular clusters of stars, globular clusters of one million stars each. These are some of the oldest stars in the universe.
The globular cluster Messier M4 is about 5,600 light-years away and contains about 100,000 stars. Among them is a planet called Methuselah, named after the son of Enoch in Genesis who is estimated to have lived for 969 years.
At the center of the star cluster M4 are pulsars and white dwarfs that orbit their common center of gravity every 161 days. Given the short-lived nature of high-mass stars, pulsars likely formed shortly after the formation of Messier 4 itself.
Methusheleh also orbits this center, but at a much more comfortable rate about once every 100 years, at a similar distance to that of Uranus orbiting our sun.
It is a gas giant planet with a mass about 2.5 times that of Jupiter. Methuselah is thought to have formed as a natural planet around a sun-like star during the first billion years of the universe’s formation. It was then captured in orbit around the host pulsar, which has been in orbit ever since.
The high density of stars in globular clusters allows two stars to meet closely and also to swap planets. Methosaleh is the oldest known planet in the universe, formed about 12.7 billion years ago with all stars in M4.
The pulsating planet is a world of extremes, but perhaps not the most unusual. Several theoretical studies have suggested the existence of planets orbiting black holes. However, nothing has been found so far.
