A gamma-ray pulsar discovered on the edge of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud is the first celestial object of its kind ever found in a galaxy other than the Milky Way, NASA officials confirmed in a statement released earlier this week.
The object, which is located about 163,000 light-years from Earth, is also the most luminous gamma-ray pulsar to date, Pierrick Martin, an astrophysicist at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in France, reported in the latest edition of the journal Science.
The Tarantula Nebula is the largest, most active and most complex region of star formation in our little corner of the universe, and in the earliest stages of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope mission, it was identified as a bright source of these high-energy forms of light, they noted.
At first, this luminosity was attributed to subatomic particle collisions accelerated in the shock waves produced by exploding stars. However, Martin’s team has now discovered that about half of the gamma-ray brightness attributed to the nebula is caused by a lone pulsar, PSR J0540-6919 (J0540 for short). That, Martin said, was “a genuine surprise.”
Research could improve our understanding of pulsar physics
J0540 is one of two pulsars discovered to date in the Tarantula Nebula. While it spins at a rate of just under 20 times per second, the other pulsar, PSR J0537-6910 (J0537 for short), is the fastest rotating young pulsar discovered to date, spinning nearly 62 times per second. It took Martin and his colleagues more than six years of observations to detect J0540’s gamma rays.
“The gamma-ray pulses from J0540 have 20 times the intensity of the previous record-holder, the pulsar in the famous Crab Nebula, yet they have roughly similar levels of radio, optical and X-ray emission,” said study co-author Lucas Guillemot from the Laboratory for Physics and Chemistry of Environment and Space, said. “Accounting for these differences will guide us to a better understanding of the extreme physics at work in young pulsars.”
In addition, the researchers found that J0540 is approximately 1,700 years told, or twice the age of the Crab Nebula pulsar. For the sake of comparison, the majority of the 2,500 known pulsars range from 10,000 years old to hundreds of millions of years old., NASA said. Thus far, Fermi has increased the number of known gamma-ray pulsars from seven to more than 160.
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Image credit: NASA Goddard/YouTube
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