Latest Binary pulsar Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Pulsars are one of the most baffling classes of astronomical objects. Originally discovered as flickering sources of radio waves, pulsars were soon interpreted as rapidly rotating and strongly magnetized neutron stars about the size of a small city. Because of the oppositely directed beams of radiation emitted from their magnetic poles, pulsars are like cosmic lighthouses. The star spins and the beams sweep past the Earth, displaying a...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Scientists at the Max Planck Institute have discovered a millisecond pulsar accompanied by an unusual sub-stellar partner known as a "black widow." The team has solved the mystery and identified the culprit of a source of strong gamma-rays found in the constellation of Centaurus back in 1994. Millisecond gamma-ray pulsar PSR J1311-3430 was found through a new data analysis method developed by the scientists at the Max Planck...

Pulsars, superdense neutron stars, are perhaps the most extraordinary physics laboratories in the Universe. Research on these extreme and exotic objects already has produced two Nobel Prizes. Pulsar researchers now are poised to learn otherwise-unavailable details of nuclear physics, to test General Relativity in conditions of extremely strong gravity, and to directly detect gravitational waves with a "telescope" nearly the size of our Galaxy. Neutron stars are the remnants of massive...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 3, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- An international team of scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a surprisingly powerful millisecond pulsar that challenges existing theories about how these objects form. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) At the same time, another team has located nine new gamma-ray pulsars in Fermi data, using improved analytical techniques. A pulsar is a type of neutron star that emits...

[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] | [ Video 3 ] NASA said on Thursday that its scientists have discovered a surprisingly powerful millisecond pulsar that challenges existing theories. The international team of scientists used NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to find that the object is the most luminous pulsar detected in the galaxy cluster to date, spinning at 11,000 rotations per minute. The researchers wrote in the November 3 issue of the journal Science that the pulsar is only 25...

  An international team of astronomers has discovered an exotic planet that appears to be made of diamond orbiting a tiny star in our galaxy. The new planet, which is far denser than any other previously known, consists primarily of carbon.  However, its high density has led scientists to calculate the carbon must be crystalline, meaning a large part of the planet would effectively be diamond. "The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised...

In December 2010, a pair of mismatched stars in the southern constellation Crux whisked past each other at a distance closer than Venus orbits the sun. The system possesses a so-far unique blend of a hot and massive star with a compact fast-spinning pulsar. The pair's closest encounters occur every 3.4 years and each is marked by a sharp increase in gamma rays, the most extreme form of light.The unique combination of stars, the long wait between close approaches, and periods of intense...

Astronomers using NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) have found the first fast X-ray pulsar to be eclipsed by its companion star. Further studies of this unique stellar system will shed light on some of the most compressed matter in the universe and test a key prediction of Einstein's relativity theory.The pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star -- the crushed core of a massive star that long ago exploded as a supernova. Neutron stars pack more than the sun's mass into a ball nearly...

GREENBELT, Md., Aug. 17 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers using NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) have found the first fast X-ray pulsar to be eclipsed by its companion star. Further studies of this unique stellar system will shed light on some of the most compressed matter in the universe and test a key prediction of Einstein's relativity theory. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The...

Idle computers are the astronomers' playground: Three citizen scientists "“ a German and an American couple "“ have discovered a new radio pulsar hidden in data gathered by the Arecibo Observatory. This is the first deep-space discovery by Einstein@Home, which uses donated time from the home and office computers of 250,000 volunteers from 192 different countries. (Science Express, Aug. 12, 2010.)The citizens credited with the discovery are Chris and Helen Colvin, of Ames, Iowa and Daniel...