Latest Pulsars Stories

NASA Pulsars have a number of unusual qualities. Like zombies, they shine even though they’re technically dead, and they rotate rapidly, emitting powerful and regular beams of radiation that are seen as flashes of light, blinking on and off at intervals from seconds to milliseconds. A NASA team has built a first-of-a-kind testbed that simulates these distinctive pulsations. The pulsar-on-a-table, known as the Goddard X-ray Navigation Laboratory Testbed, was built to test and validate...

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...

Watch the video "Chandra Captures Neutron Star In Action" redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online New video footage of the Vela pulsar, a neutron star located approximately 1,000 light-years from Earth, suggests that the pulsar could be slowly wobbling as it spins, NASA officials said on Monday. Formed following the collapse of a massive star, the Vela pulsar is approximately 12 miles in diameter and capable of making a complete rotation in under 90 milliseconds. The...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Unlike with some blockbuster films, the sequel to a movie from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is better than the first. This latest movie features a deeper look at a fast moving jet of particles produced by a rapidly rotating neutron star, and may provide new insight into the nature of some of the densest matter in the universe. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The hero of this Chandra movie is the...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Researchers reported in the journal Physical Review Letters that they have found a "glitch" in a 40-year-old theory explaining the periodic speeding up or "glitching" of pulsars. Pulsars emit a rotating beam of electromagnetic radiation, which can be detected by powerful telescopes once it sweeps past the Earth. The cosmic objects, which are highly magnetized rotating neutron stars formed from the remains of supernovae, rotate at...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new model developed by researchers at the University of Southampton explains how the spin of a pulsar slows down as the star gets older. A pulsar is a highly magnetized rotating neutron star that forms from the remains of a supernova which emits a rotating beam of electromagnetic radiation. Pulsars rotate at very stable speeds, but slow down as they emit radiation and lose their energy. Researchers now say that they have found a...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomer Fabrice Mottez made a series of predictions at the European Planetary Science Congress about the properties of planetary systems around pulsars. Pulsars are dense balls of matter which are heavier than the Sun, yet only are a few tens of miles in diameter. They rotate rapidly, and give off a bright flashing light, giving them their name "pulsating star." So far, there have been two pulsars observed that are home to...

[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A special gamma-ray pulsar with the hiccups has been discovered by researchers from the Max Planck Institutes for Gravitational Physics and Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) using data constructed from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The pulsar J1838-0537 is very young, and has experienced the strongest rotation glitch ever observed for a gamma-ray-only pulsar. Pure gamma-ray pulsars are difficult to identify...

[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers may have discovered the fastest moving pulsar ever seen using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton. Astronomers used X-ray observations, combined with infrared data from the 2MASS project and optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey to find evidence for the record-breaking pulsar. The XMM-Newton image was produced when a massive star exploded as a supernova, leaving behind a...

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...