MessageToEagle.com -
Pulsars are very interesting to scientists because they are special types of neutron stars. Small (about 10 miles in diameter) and dense
(one teaspoon weighs about a billion tons), they exhibit immense gravitational and magnetic forces not found on Earth.
The Large Area Telescope (LAT), built by SLAC for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, collects information on high-energy gamma rays from
numerous sources in the sky.
Among these are small, elusive objects called pulsars, which spin up to hundreds of times per second.
Their name derives from the beams their magnetic fields produce as a result of this spin, which look like the pulsing beam of a lighthouse when,
by chance, they happen to sweep across our field of view.
The LAT has seen the gamma-ray signatures of more than 100 pulsars and is revolutionizing the study of
these flashy objects in gamma rays, which are the most energetic form of light.
A team led by postdoctoral researcher Matthew Kerr of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), and Columbia University
radio astronomer Fernando Camilo is reporting the use of new techniques for hunting pulsars.
They and their colleagues have found a way to look for likely pulsar candidates by combining observations from the LAT and the Parkes radio telescope in Australia.
This approach combines the broad reach of an all-sky telescope (the LAT) with the deep sensitivity of a radio telescope, which can view only a tiny part of
the sky at a time.
Pulsar PSR B1257+12, Image creidt: NASA/JPL, Caltech
So far, the discovery of five more rapidly rotating, or “millisecond” pulsars, including one particularly intriguing object, prove
that the technique is successful and likely to uncover many more pulsars in our galaxy. One especially interesting object discovered
with this technique seems to have a previously unknown waveform – a gamma-ray peak before and after each radio peak – an effect the
team could not explain using standard models of pulsar geometry.
This suggests that the radio part of the beam may originate at two distinct points above the object’s surface.
This variation increases the mystery and allure of these fascinating astrophysical phenomena.
This work is described in part in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ, 2012, 748, 2), and based in part on a KIPAC Tidbit by Jack Singal.
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MessageToEagle.com -
Pulsars are very interesting to scientists because they are special types of neutron stars. Small (about 10 miles in diameter) and dense
(one teaspoon weighs about a billion tons), they exhibit immense gravitational and magnetic forces not found on Earth.
In 1943, an ancient papyrus was bought by the Cairo museum.
It was written in Hieratic and although portions of it were eaten away by ants, it was a very precious ancient document.
The papyrus contained three separate books dealing with astronomy. One of the books was the Cairo Calendar, and now it reveals an ancient astronomical secret...
Physicists at Cern have not yet been able to confirm the existence of
the elusive 
It is every astronomers' dream to find an Earth-like with liquid water and perfect conditions for life, as we know it.
This is why the recent discovery is so exciting.
An international group of astronomers have detected a new exoplanet that appears to be very similar to Earth. Could life exist there?
Surprisingly, some of the oldest galaxies in the Universe have three times more stellar mass, and so many more stars, than
all current models of galaxy evolution predict.
A new finding made by the Atlas3D international team, led by an Oxford University scientist, helped to find a way to remove
the 'halo' of dark matter that has clouded previous calculations.
At an age of about 200 million years, this pulsar is the oldest and faintest isolated pulsar ever detected in X-rays but
it's spinning only slightly faster than one revolution per second!
Among isolated pulsars, it is over 10 times older than the previous record holder with an X-ray detection.
The use of stars, planets and stellar constellations for navigation was of fundamental importance for mankind for thousands of years.
Have you ever asked yourself how the starship Enterprise in the TV series Star Trek found its way through the depths of space?
Can information really escape from a black hole? According to new research it seems to be possible for something to actually escape from a black hole.
Celestial objects known as pulsars are still full of secrets. It is takes time and many efforts to learn all their secrets. Previous
studies reached the paradoxical conclusion that some millisecond pulsars are even older than the universe itself. It was time to resolve this paradox.