Latest Anomalous X-ray pulsar Stories

[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online One recently discovered star seems to have a split personality, with both a magnetar and pulsar consuming the object. The European Space Agency (ESA) said the newly discovered star appears to be a pulsar while hiding an intense internal magnetic field like a magnetar. The internal field is many times stronger than its external magnetic field, leading to its entry into the new class of "low-field...

The quick turn-around time of the INTEGRAL operation teams has enabled rare high-energy observations of a magnetar. The observations, which were performed as a Target of Opportunity, followed indications late last week that this magnetar, the Anomalous X-ray Pulsar, 1E 1547.0-5408, had entered outburst mode. 1E1547.0-5408 is one of only 9 confirmed Anomalous X-ray Pulsars (AXP) - isolated, young neutron stars with unusually strong magnetic fields (1014G -1015G). Together with Soft Gamma...

X-ray and gamma-ray data from ESA's XMM-Newton and Integral orbiting observatories has been used to test, for the first time, the physical processes that make magnetars, an atypical class of neutron stars, shine in X-rays.Neutron stars are remnants of massive stars (10-50 times as massive as our Sun) that have collapsed on to themselves under their own weight. Made almost entirely of neutrons (subatomic particles with no electric charge), these stellar corpses concentrate more than the mass...

NASA and McGill scientists find star which morphs from pulsar to magnetarObservations from NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) have revealed that the youngest known pulsing neutron star has thrown a temper tantrum. The collapsed star occasionally unleashes powerful bursts of X-rays, which are forcing astronomers to rethink the life cycle of neutron stars."We are watching one type of neutron star literally change into another right before our very eyes. This is a long-sought missing...

ESA -- Tiny stellar 'corpses' have been caught blasting surprisingly powerful X-rays and gamma rays across our galaxy by ESA's gamma-ray observatory Integral.This discovery links these objects to the most magnetically active bodies in the Universe and forces scientists to reconsider just how dead such stellar corpses really are. Known as anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs), the stellar corpses were first spotted pulsing low-energy X-rays into space during the 1970s by the Uhuru X-ray satellite....