#pulsars

[steelheart-redux]

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[mindblowingscience]

Astronomers Discover Slow-Spinning Radio Source That 'Shouldn't Exist'

When some of the biggest stars reach the end of their lives, they explode in spectacular supernovas and leave behind incredibly dense cores

When some of the biggest stars reach the end of their lives, they explode in spectacular supernovas and leave behind incredibly dense cores called neutron stars. Some of these remnants emit powerful radio beams from their magnetic poles. As the star spins, these beams sweep past Earth and produce periodic pulses of radio waves, much like a cosmic lighthouse. This behaviour has earned them the name " pulsars". Pulsars typically spin incredibly fast, often completing a full rotation in just seconds – or even less. Over the last three years, some mysterious objects have emerged that emit periodic radio pulses at much slower intervals, which is hard to explain with our current understanding of neutron stars.

Continue Reading.

[livingforstars]

The Gamma Ray Sky - March 21st, 1998.

"What if you could "see" gamma rays? If you could, the sky would seem to be filled with a shimmering high-energy glow from the most exotic and mysterious objects in the Universe. In the early 1990s, NASA's orbiting Compton Observatory produced this premier vista of the entire sky in gamma rays - photons with more than 40 million times the energy of visible light. The diffuse gamma-ray glow from the plane of our Milky Way galaxy runs horizontally through the false-colour image. The brightest spots in the galactic plane (right of center) are pulsars - spinning magnetised neutron stars formed in the violent crucibles of stellar explosions. Above and below the plane, quasars, believed to be powered by supermassive black holes, produce gamma-ray beacons at the edges of the Universe."

[aloyxwrites]

did you know it was a woman who first discovered pulsars (and helped us study black holes)? and that they gave the nobel prize to her supervisor instead?

jocelyn bell burnell, 1967.

she finally got a $3m prize in 2018 and gave it all away to help underrepresented students become physicists!!

(i randomly discovered this while listening to an audiobook about the universe)

[puckszone]

"PSR J1841−0500 is a pulsar... discovered in December 2008 by Fernando Camilo. [...] At the time of discovery, it was spinning once every 0.9 seconds. However, in 2009, it stopped emitting pulses completely. Most pulsars that stop emitting pulses only do so for a few minutes. But PSR J1841-0500 did so for 580 days. Then in August 2011, it started pulsing again." [source]

Figures from: "PSR J1841–0500: A RADIO PULSAR THAT MOSTLY IS NOT THERE" by Camilo et al. 2012

@hockeyblrpoetryclub ✨

Apologies in advance: this is going to be really long. But hopefully interesting, if you want to learn more about pulsars!

I do astronomy research for a living (when I'm not watching hockey) so I knew I wanted to challenge myself to something a little out of the box with this poetry challenge!!

Pulsars are FREAKY & so so fun. They are a special type of neutron star - the remnant of a supergiant star going supernova. Only black holes are more dense than these guys! And pulsars are special neutron stars that are REALLY magnetized, rotate incredibly fast, and send out these "pulsing" emissions. (See: the figure in the 3rd to last edit image, and also the mention of a "lighthouse" in Lee's poem!)

The lighthouse analogy is actually extremely apt - pulsar emissions are incredibly regular and astronomers often use them as a sort of steady "cosmic clock". Which is why it's so fascinating that this specific pulsar - PSR J1841-0500 - stopped emitting signal for over 500 days before starting again!

While doing this project, I learned that we have only detected one other pulsar that has stopped pulsing for more than a few minutes. That pulsar emits signal for a week, turns off for a month, and then repeats the cycle. So weird!! So many things to still discover about pulsars!

The figures I used above all have actual meaning, beyond also (hopefully) looking very cool. The colored figures are actual observations of the region around the pulsar! The pulsar location is labeled with a white circle.

The two figures with "pulse longitude" are profiles of the pulse in radio wavelengths. The first one is the 2009 profile, when it was first discovered, and the second one is the 2011 profile, when it came back! Same for the final image - that's a plot made from the 2011 data, with an overlaid grey image from the 2009 data. Cool stuff!

I knew I wanted to put this poem together with Jared McCann almost instantly. For one, the "prince's wakening kiss" was too perfect to ignore. I think about Canner's old teammate calling him the "lonely star" about once a month.

But, beyond that, I love the narrative that being chosen by the Kraken in the expansion draft was a chance for him to settle down, to find a home, to rest in the curving arms of the Milky Way for just a little bit. We chose him!! We love him!! And in return, he's woken up - he's our points leader for yet another season, he's a force in the community, he's a mentor for the younger players.

He's a lonely star - one that collapsed under its own gravity, only to become something stronger, steadier, and firmer.

words from - Mary Soon Lee

photos from - x x x x

& if you actually read this far - thanks so SO much for caring about my ramblings!! you're the best. come talk to me about space, or jared mccann, any time. :)

[colorpicked-pride-flags-jwst]

Bisexual flag colorpicked from artist’s impression of hot Jupiter PSR J2322-2650b and the pulsar it is orbiting

[kittyit]

I Changed Astronomy Forever. He Won the Nobel Prize for It.

Growing up in a Quaker household, Jocelyn Bell Burnell was raised to believe that she had as much right to an education as anyone else. But as a girl in the 1940s in Northern Ireland, her enthusiasm for the sciences was met with hostility from teachers and male students. Undeterred, she went on to study radio astronomy at Glasgow University, where she was the only woman in many of her classes.

In 1967, Burnell made a discovery that altered our perception of the universe. As a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University assisting the astronomer Anthony Hewish, she discovered pulsars — compact, spinning celestial objects that give off beams of radiation, like cosmic lighthouses.

[honourablejester]

Lighthouse Stars

You know sometimes you have a fact or a concept about the universe that you’d sort of vaguely brushed past a time or two but it never actually caught your brain in a way that sparked something before, until abruptly it does?

I was watching a Spacedock youtube video about pulsars in science fiction, and … I’ve heard of pulsars before, and this is the standard language around them, but I still never fully grasped until now the awesome concept that pulsars are lighthouse stars.

Pulsars are neutron stars, the superdense, compact remnants of supernovas, and they are super magnetised, and because they’re so tiny and so magnetic and rotating at such ridiculous speeds, that electromagnetic radiation is beaming out from their poles like twin lighthouse beams of radiation, causing the pulsar to appear to, well, pulse when the beam sweeps in our direction. They’re also so regular and so precise that they can and have been used as space navigation aids. Including on the Voyager Golden Disc map showing Earth’s position relative to 14 pulsars:

And. Look. You all know me and lighthouses from a standing start. The tangled ball of imagery around a beam of light in the darkness showing safe passage through the deadly chaos of the ocean. And. That, but in space. A star that is a lighthouse.

I don’t know why this never clicked for me before, but oh my god that is an image and a half.

And. So. For bonus points, because I love space horror so very, very much? There is a star system called PSR B1257+12 which was the first pulsar to have confirmed planets orbiting it. There’s three planets that have been confirmed so far. And in the mid-2010s during the Name Exo Worlds event, the public named this pulsar and its planets Lich, Draugr, Poltergeist and Phobetor. The star is named after an undead wizard, and its planets are named after various spirits, undead and nightmare creatures. So. Again. Just by the naming conventions, not any properties of the star itself (although pulsars, like all neutron stars, can be argued as undead given that they’re the remnants of supernovas), this is an undead lighthouse star. A ghostly stellar lighthouse, its twin beams sweeping the void, surrounded by three silent, undead worlds.

Please god tell me somebody’s written a space horror story with that concept? Because. *flails madly*

I think pulsars may be my new favourite type of star. And yes, I should have twigged this imagery years ago, pulsars have always been described as lighthouses, but still.

Lighthouse stars. Undead lighthouse stars. What a spectacular concept.