Student discovers slowest ever pulsar star

An approximately 14 million year old pulsar star that is the "slowest-spinning" of its kind ever identified has been discovered by a Ph.D. student from The University of Manchester.

Neutron stars in the computer cloud

The combined computing power of 200,000 private PCs helps astronomers take an inventory of the Milky Way. The Einstein@Home project connects home and office PCs of volunteers from around the world to a global supercomputer. ...

Einstein's theory passes rigorous 16-year tests (Update)

An international team has used telescopes around the world, including CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope—Murriyang, to complete the most challenging tests yet of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Physicists create tabletop antimatter 'gun'

(Phys.org) —An international team of physicists working at the University of Michigan has succeeded in building a tabletop antimatter "gun" capable of spewing short bursts of positrons. In their paper published in the journal ...

Heaviest neutron star to date is a 'black widow' eating its mate

A dense, collapsed star spinning 707 times per second—making it one of the fastest spinning neutron stars in the Milky Way galaxy—has shredded and consumed nearly the entire mass of its stellar companion and, in the process, ...

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Pulsar

Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation. The observed periods of their pulses range from 1.4 milliseconds to 8.5 seconds. The radiation can only be observed when the beam of emission is pointing towards the Earth. This is called the lighthouse effect and gives rise to the pulsed nature that gives pulsars their name. Because neutron stars are very dense objects, the rotation period and thus the interval between observed pulses are very regular. For some pulsars, the regularity of pulsation is as precise as an atomic clock. Pulsars are known to have planets orbiting them, as in the case of PSR B1257+12. Werner Becker of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics said in 2006, "The theory of how pulsars emit their radiation is still in its infancy, even after nearly forty years of work."

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