Discovered: A New Kind of Pulsar! Its Incredible!

[junglelord]

New Gamma Ray only Pulsar family discovered. Its incredible (pun intended)

Oct. 17, 2008: About three times a second, a 10,000-year-old stellar corpse sweeps a beam of gamma-rays toward Earth. Just discovered by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the object, called a pulsar, is the first one known that "blinks" in pure gamma rays.

"This is the first example of a new class of pulsars," says Stanford University's Peter Michelson, principal investigator for Fermi's Large Area Telescope. "[We think] it will give us fundamental insights into how these collapsed stars work."

Right: An artist's concept of the newly discovered pulsar. Clouds of charged particles move along the pulsar's magnetic field lines (blue) and create a lighthouse-like beam of gamma rays (purple). [Larger image]

Pulsars were first discovered in 1967 by student radio astronomer Jocelyn Bell and her thesis advisor Tony Hewish. The radio pulses they recorded were uncannily steady--so much so that some astronomers wondered if they were picking up signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. The correct explanation was even stranger: Pulsars are spinning neutron stars packing the mass of the sun into a sphere about 20 km across. Whirling around thousands of times each hour, they beam radio pulses into the cosmos in the style of a rapidfire lighthouse.

Since then, about 1800 pulsars have been discovered mainly via their radio emission. A fraction of pulsars go beyond radio; they also emit pulses of visible light, X-rays, and even high-energy gamma-rays. This discovery by Fermi is different because it is a purely gamma-ray pulsar. The star is silent across parts of electromagnetic spectrum where pulsars are normally found and hints at a whole population of previously unsuspected pulsars waiting to be picked out of the heavens.

The gamma-ray-only pulsar lies within a supernova remnant known as CTA 1 located about 4,600 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus. Its lighthouse-like beam sweeps Earth's way every 316.86 milliseconds. The pulsar, which formed in a supernova explosion about 10,000 years ago, emits 1,000 times the energy of our sun.

"The Large Area Telescope provides us with a unique probe of the galaxy's pulsar population, revealing objects we would not otherwise even know exist," says Fermi project scientist Steve Ritz of the Goddard Space Flight Center.

The pulsar is not located at the center of the surrounding supernova remnant CTA 1. Click on the image to view a larger map.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008 ... r/cta1.jpg

The pulsar in CTA 1 is not located at the center of the supernova's expanding gaseous shell. Supernova explosions can be asymmetrical, often imparting a "kick" that sends the neutron star careening through space. Based on the remnant's age and the pulsar's distance from its center, astronomers believe the neutron star is moving at about a million miles per hour -- a typical speed for neutron stars.

Fermi's Large Area Telescope scans the entire sky every three hours and detects photons with energies ranging from 20 million to more than 300 billion times the energy of visible light.

"This observation shows the power of the Large Area Telescope," Michelson adds. "It is so sensitive that we can now discover new types of objects just by observing their gamma-ray emissions."

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008 ... pulsar.htm

[substance]

Interesting! Can someone offer an explanation for it`s radiation being limited only to gamma-rays?

[junglelord]

I believe the EU model of the pulsar is indicitive of its arc mode, not its rotation.
Therefore the energy signature is evidence of strength of the electric field.
The stronger the electric field the higher the frequency the ejected photons become.
This one is situated in the strongest electric field to date as it ejects gamma rays.
Lightning , which is arc mode plasma does the same.

[substance]

So basically if it were of lower electric field strength, it`s radiation would have been with lower frequency and not entirely shifted in the gamma-ray region. Now someone just has to make a short youtube clip about this particular pulsar and our explanation of it.

[StefanR]

Strange Star or Strange Science?

Nowhere is the gravitational paradigm of cosmology shown to exhibit more strangeness than in compact high energy phenomena in deep space. A report in the journal Nature of 15 November proposes that a recently discovered star "is made of an exotic stuff called 'strange matter', never yet seen on Earth". In other words, it may be a "strange star". This bizarre suggestion comes out of the mathematics describing stars that generate rapid pulses of radiation, commonly called "pulsars". The x-ray pulses are thought to be due to a rotating beam of x-rays that flashes toward the Earth once per revolution like a cosmic lighthouse.

http://www.holoscience.com/views/view_strange.htm

But astronomers have not yet considered the most obvious explanation in an electric universe--that the Vela Pulsar itself is not the "neutron star" of mathematical conjecture, but an electrical discharge at the center of an intense electric field. If this is so, the "pulsing" of the star is simply the natural pulsing of plasma discharge.

Astronomers expected that the "rotation" (pulsing) of the neutron star--conceived as an isolated mass in space -- would slow at a consistent rate. But then they observed a significant "glitch" in the pulse rate, an event that "released a burst of energy that was carried outward at near the speed of light by the pulsar wind." Of course, unpredictable variations in both the pulse rate and intensity of an electrically discharging Pulsar would be expected with any changes in the electrical environment through which it moved.

Proponents of the electric model are particularly impressed by the two embedded "bows" seen along the polar jet (upper left). Astronomers initially called these "windbow shocks", a theorized mechanical effect of high-velocity material encountering the interstellar medium. But electrical theorists recognized a configuration common to intense plasma discharge in laboratory experiments: toruses or rings stacked along the polar axis of the discharge. And subsequent enhanced pictures (cf., upper right) made clear that the "bows" were in fact stacked toruses, not easily explained in gravitational terms.

Also noteworthy is the manner in which the axial jet or column, as it extends beyond the "upper" torus, takes on an undulating, serpentine quality, as revealed by a series of Chandra snapshots (lower array). This too is of great significance to the electrical theorists since some in their group--years before these recent observations in space-- claimed that ancient witnesses observed such undulating phenomena stretching along the polar axis of the earth, when our planet moved through a more dense, more electrically active environment.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/ ... pulsar.htm

[StefanR]

Some about the Crab-nebula and it's pulsar,

The observation of high-energy particles and photons confronts scientists with the obvious but difficult question of where and how charged particles can be accelerated up to the energies required for them to radiate in the high-energy regime. Environments where particles can be accelerated are also environments where particles can easily radiate their energy away, and models must account for a system where the potentially large amount of energy available through shocks, gravitation, or rotation can be transferred to charged particles in an efficient and orderly fashion.

The observation of TeV gamma-rays from the Crab nebula is the almost prototypical example of this class of problem. These gamma-rays are thought to originate by inverse Compton scattering of high-energy (up to a few 1015 eV) electrons with ambient synchrotron photons (observed in great detail at radio frequencies). But do these high energy electrons actually exist in the nebula? Low energy electrons clearly do, as demonstrated by the detection of polarized radiation from the radio to the few hundred of keV energy range.
The angle of polarization coincides with the pulsar's rotation axis. Although INTEGRAL cannot pinpoint where the photons are produced, the orientation of the polarization can be directly correlated with the orientation of the magnetic field where the photons are radiated. With this information, and by leveraging information from observations at other energies, Dean at al. were able to estimate that the radiating electrons must have an energy of the order of 1015 eV.

This observation, which can be seen as almost a direct measurement of the energy of the electrons involved, indicates that the Crab pulsar, and similar objects, can accelerate electrons to the energies required to explain a wide range of astronomical observations.

With the detection of polarized emission from the Crab pulsar another piece of the cosmic accelerators puzzle has been revealed.

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object ... ctid=43321

[StefanR]

Either way pulsars are still the stuff of strange, anomalous, unexpected, surprisingly, etc discoveries. In other words not well understood conventionally.

INTEGRAL has detected surprisingly powerful X-ray and gamma ray emission from a special class of neutron star. This discovery makes them the most magnetically active bodies in the Universe.

Known as anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs), this type of neutron star was first spotted pulsing low-energy X-rays into space during the 1970s by the Uhuru X-ray satellite. AXPs are extremely rare with only seven known to exist. Initially, AXPs were thought to be members of an X-ray binary system, with the X-ray emission produced by matter falling from a companion star onto the AXP.
Discovered in three of the four AXPs studied, the emission has a distinctive energy signature that forces astronomers to consider that they are produced by super-strong magnetic fields.

"The amount of energy in the hard X-rays and soft gamma rays is ten to almost one thousand times more than can be explained by a kind of magnetic friction between the spinning AXP and surrounding space," said Wim Hermsen of SRON, the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Utrecht, who together with SRON colleagues made the observations. This leaves magnetic field decay as the only viable alternative.

Neutron stars with super-strong magnetic fields are dubbed magnetars. Magnetars are the end product of a massive star that has exploded at the end of its life, leaving only the star's central core. Each magnetar is only around 15 kilometres in diameter yet contains more than one and a half times the mass of the Sun.

Magnetars are also responsible for the soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs), which explosively release massive quantities of energy when catastrophic reorganisations of their magnetic fields spontaneously take place. The big difference between an SGR and an AXP is that the process is continuous rather than explosive in an AXP and less energetic.

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object ... ctid=38954