Astronomers have identified a pulsar spinning at more than 42,000 revolutions per minute, making it the second-fastest known.The new object, named PSR J0952-0607 — or J0952 for short\u2014is classified as a millisecond pulsar and is located between 3,200 and 5,700 light-years away in the constellation Sextans.<\/p>\n
The pulsar contains about 1.4 times the Sun\u2019s mass and is orbited every 6.4 hours by a companion star that has been whittled away to less than 20 times the mass of the planet Jupiter, according to a study published online in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters.<\/p>\n
The discovery was made with the Netherlands-based Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope by following up on mysterious high-energy sources mapped out by NASA\u2019s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.<\/p>\n
\u201cRoughly a third of the gamma-ray sources found by Fermi have not been detected at other wavelengths,\u201d said Elizabeth Ferrara, a member of the discovery team at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.<\/p>\n
\u201dMany of these unassociated sources may be pulsars, but we often need follow-up from radio observatories to detect the pulses and prove it,\u201d Ferrara added.<\/p>\n
A pulsar is the core of a massive star that exploded as a supernova. In this stellar remnant, also called a neutron star, the equivalent mass of half a million Earths is crushed into a magnetised, spinning ball.<\/p>\n
The rotating magnetic field powers beams of radio waves, visible light, X-rays and gamma rays. If a beam happens to sweep across Earth, astronomers observe regular pulses of emission and classify the object as a pulsar.<\/p>\n
The LOFAR discovery also hints at the potential to find a new population of ultra-fast pulsars.<\/p>\n
Theorists say pulsars could rotate as fast as 72,000 revolutions per minute before breaking apart, yet the fastest spin known\u2014by PSR J1748-2446ad, reaching nearly 43,000 revolutions per minute\u2014is just 60 per cent of the theoretical maximum.<\/p>\n
Perhaps pulsars with faster periods simply can\u2019t form. But the gap between theory and observation may also result from the difficulty in detecting the fastest rotators.<\/p>\n
IANS<\/strong><\/p>\n Picture courtesy: Alamy<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Astronomers have identified a pulsar spinning at more than 42,000 revolutions per minute, making it the second-fastest known.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":4794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31,103],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4793"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}