Image courtesy of James Josephides
Joel Kontinen
A newly discovered neutron star is behaving so
strangely that it may alter our understanding of the dense remains left behind
when stellar objects die
Some astronomers are worried because they see a neutron star that
should not be living. It is a mystery
that is brought about the Big Bang story . But who do they support a theory
that is one the way out?
”A
collapsed star around 13,000 light years away is so unusual that the
researchers who have discovered it say it shouldn’t exist.
It was first detected in January 2024 by the ASKAP
radio telescope in Western Australia and is likely to be a kind of pulsar that
has never been seen before.
When supermassive stars reach the end of their lives
and explode in a supernova, the remnants form a super-dense object called a
neutron star. Pulsars are neutron stars that spin rapidly, emitting radio waves
from their magnetic poles as they rotate. Most pulsars spin at speeds of more
than one revolution per second and we receive a pulse at
the same frequency, each time a radio beam points
towards us.
But in recent years, astronomers have begun to find
compact objects that emit pulses of radio waves at a much slower rate. This has
baffled scientists, who had thought that radio wave flashes should cease when
the rotation slows to more than a minute for each spin.
These slow-spinning objects are known as long-period
radio transients. Last year, a team led by Manisha Caleb at the University
of Sydney, Australia, announced the discovery of a transient with a period of 54 minutes.”
God made the universe at the beginning, it is full of wonders
that people do not understand.
Source:
James Woodford 2025
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