by If you buy links to our articles, the future and its syndicate partners can earn a commission.
An illustration of a pulsar in space. | Credit: Nasas Goddard Space Flight Center
What do you get if you star in the same dead star for more than 20 years? Insight into the strangest physics in the universe.
The star PSR J0922+0638 is a pulsar. Pulsare are neutron stars-die Ultradsive remaining kernels long dead stars, which rotate quickly and emit the radiation at regular intervals. Pulsare have some of the wildest physics in the cosmos, with matter compressing the right to the edge of the ultimate breakdown into a black hole. The only thing that prevents this catastrophe is exotic quantum pressures.
A typical pulsar is only a few miles wide, but contains the mass of several suns. This makes Pulsars some of the densest objects in the universe – secondly only for black hole singing singing. With these extreme densely swallowing neutrons and protons together to form a single gigantic atomic nucleus. While physicists have a somewhat decent understanding of what core material does in the extreme layers in the densities, the nuclei of the neutron stars remain complete secrets.
Due to their extremely high density, pulsare rotate with exceptional regularity. In this case, PSR J0922+0638 has a rotary period of 0.43063 seconds and has largely claimed this rotary rate for hundreds of thousands of years. But it is not perfect and astronomers can use detailed observations of changes in this rotary rate to guess what is going on in the Pulsar.
Recently, astronomers have combined data from Nanshan Radio Telescope in China and in the meerkat array in South Africa to see how precisely the timing of this pulse was. It turned out that PSR J0922+0638 has not been almost perfect in the past two decades.
In their paper, which was published in the Preprint database Arxiv, the astronomers found over a dozen “breakdown” or abrupt changes to the rotation rate. Some of them had been observed before, but many were brand new. A typical error changes the rotation rate by less than a factor of a billion. But for the forces involved with a Pulsar, this is a massive change in energy. Strangely enough, these disorders occurred a bit regularly and repeated about every 550 days.
On the sudden disorders, the astronomers found that the rotation rate of PSR J0922+0638 slowly opened and slowed down in a cycle of around 500 to 600 days.
An overhead view of the sea-radi telescopic array of South Africa under construction. | Credit: Ska South Africa
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the disorders of PSR J0922+0638 corresponded to the same cycle as its slow changes in its rotary rate. The astronomers are not exactly sure what causes the changes, but they pointed out several possible explanations.
Pulsare have enormously strong magnetic fields that can store and release energy. Perhaps PSR J0922+0638 is experiencing something that resembles the Magnacy cycle on the sun, in which it alternately goes through periods with strong and weak sunpleck activity.
Related stories
– Mystery of Dead Stars’ Disrupting ‘Heart Slice’ could have a twisted solution
-Hasa X -ray room
– Fast rotating dead stars could reveal dark matter secrets
Another explanation could be that there is an exotic superfluid of basic particles deep in the core of the pulsar. In this superfluid, the rotary rate of the entire star could change, and if the liquid switched the directions, this could lead to an error.
Ultimately, we do not understand where disorders come from or exactly what is going on in Pulsars. But the two have to be connected somehow, and only through careful, committed observations will we find out.
