12/26/2023 0 Comments Backyard monsters glitchThose pulses of electromagnetic radiation give the pulsar its name, and we can pick up the intermittent signal down here on Earth. "This lighthouse sweeps out and, if it passes of the Earth, is recorded by radio astronomers." "As the neutron star rotates, it emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation, like a lighthouse," Ashton said. The star is also rapidly spinning - in the case of the Vela pulsar, it rotates about 10 times every second. Those two features make it one of the densest objects in the universe. A neutron star has the same mass as our sun, but it's all wrapped up in a much smaller physical space of about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in diameter. After a star collapses, goes supernova and explodes, a neutron star is the small leftover remnant in its place - and it's super weird. To understand why it's such a big deal, we have to understand what a pulsar really is.Ī neutron star is one of the final stages of a star's life. Ashton said the glitch gives researchers "a unique opportunity to peer inside these objects and understand what is going on." In 2016, astronomers recorded the glitch in Vela, and the new research, led by Gregory Ashton of Monash University in Australia, puts that glitch under the microscope, detailing how it came about and what led to it. It's one of the best-known pulsars in the sky and also the brightest. A study, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, specifically looks at the Vela pulsar, a type of neutron star. While there's no definitive evidence that we live in a simulation ( sorry, Elon Musk), astronomers are puzzled by this glitch, a phenomenon they've known about for the past 50 years but still haven't quite worked out. You remember that part in the (now 20-year-old) film The Matrix where Neo looks at a black cat and then seconds later, he sees the same black cat again? And he's all like "I just had deja vu but it's OK" but it's actually not OK at all? Well, as if providing evidence that we, too, exist in the Matrix, a team of international astronomers has been watching the rapidly spinning corpse of a star - and while they were watching, they saw it "glitch."
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