Slowest Ever Pulsar Star Located In Constellation Cassiopeia Discovered By LOFAR

MessageToEagle.com – An approximately 14 million year old pulsar star that is the “slowest-spinning” of its kind ever identified has been discovered by a PhD student from The University of Manchester.

Chia Min Tan, a PhD Student based at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in Manchester’s School of Physics and Astronomy, was part of an international team including fellow astronomers at Manchester, ASTRON and the University of Amsterdam.

The team carried out the observations using the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR), whose core is located in the Netherlands.

This new pulsar, which is located in the constellation Cassiopeia some 5,200 light-years away from Earth, spins at the much slower rate of once every 23.5 seconds.

Until now, the slowest-spinning pulsar known had a rotation period of 8.5 seconds. The fastest-spinning pulsar known to science, at present, rotates once every 1.4 milliseconds, that’s 716 times per second or 42,960 a minute.

Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that produce electromagnetic radiation in beams that emanate from their magnetic poles. These “cosmic lighthouses” are born when a massive star explodes in a supernova. After such an explosion a super-dense spinning “neutron star” is left behind with a diameter of only about 20 kilometers.

What makes the discovery even more unlikely is that the radio emission lasts just 200 milliseconds of the 23.5 second rotation period.

“The radio emission that comes from a pulsar acts like a cosmic lighthouse and you can only see the signal if the radio beam is facing towards you. In this case the beam is so narrow that it might easily have missed the Earth,” Chia Min Tan said in a press release.

“Slow-spinning pulsars are even harder to detect. It is incredible to think that this pulsar spins more than 15000 times more slowly than the fastest spinning pulsar known. We hope that there are more to be found with LOFAR”.

Research

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