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Astronomers using a new type of radio telescope found the slowest pulsar rotating, a type of stellar object notoriously difficult to detect.
Pulsars are a type of neutron star, the exploding stars' cores have collapsed on themselves to form some of the densest known objects. Only the size of a city, a neutron star contains about the same mass as our sun. Only a black hole – the other possible outlet of a supernova outside a neutron star – is denser.
But not all neutron stars become pulsars. "For a neutron star to emit in the form of pulsar, it must have the right combination of magnetic field strength and spin frequency," Feryal Özel, a professor of radio, told Space.com. astronomy and astrophysics at the Arizona State University.
When a pulsar turns, it emits radio waves out of its poles, which cross the universe as the signal of a lighthouse. When the Earth is in the path of this beam, the pulsar appears as a flickering star, changing brightness at regular intervals – its period. Because of this regularity, scientists using the first radio telescopes thought they were receiving signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, leading the first pulsar, discovered in 1967, to be dubbed LGM-1, for Little Green Men. According to NASA, the fastest pulsar that currently exists runs 716 times per second.
However, slower-running pulsars are harder to detect, which is why a team of astronomers has been searching for slower pulsars using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), an unusual radio telescope located mainly in the Netherlands. but scattered throughout Western Europe. LOFAR does not combine the images of its different paintings in real time, as do most telescopes (the Very Large Array in New Mexico), but sends all the signals from its detectors to a single hub, which digitizes the image data unique and huge, according to the table's website.
In July 2017, scientists launched the LOTAAS (LOFAR Tied-Array All-Sky Survey) study to use the unique method of the matrix in order to try to find pulsars of longer period, often confused with other objects, noted Phys.org.
On September 4, a group of researchers led by Chia Min Tan of the Jodrell Bank Astrophysics Center in Manchester, UK, announced in an article published on arXiv.org that they had found the slowest pulsar ever shot 23.5. seconds per turn.
Other ground observatories, including the Green Bank telescope, the Lovell telescope and the Nancay telescope, have subsequently been able to verify the existence of the pulsar.
"We have subsequently detected pulsar pulsations in the interferometric images of the two-meter LOFAR Sky Survey, allowing a location below the second," the astronomers wrote.
Given the romantic name PSR J0250 + 5854, the dive pulsar is located some 5,200 light-years away from Earth.
Astronomers have noted in their article the potential of their method to detect pulsars even slower.
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