{"id":217999,"date":"2025-07-16T01:21:36","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T06:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/nasas-ixpe-imager-reveals-mysteries-of-rare-pulsar"},"modified":"2025-07-16T01:21:36","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T06:21:36","slug":"nasas-ixpe-imager-reveals-mysteries-of-rare-pulsar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/nasas-ixpe-imager-reveals-mysteries-of-rare-pulsar","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s IXPE imager reveals mysteries of rare pulsar"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/nasas-ixpe-imager-reveals-mysteries-of-rare-pulsar2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>An international team of astronomers has uncovered new evidence to explain how pulsing remnants of exploded stars interact with surrounding matter deep in the cosmos, using observations from NASA\u2019s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) and other telescopes.<\/p>\n<p>Scientists based in the U.S., Italy, and Spain, set their sights on a mysterious cosmic duo called PSR J1023+0038, or J1023 for short. The J1023 system is comprised of a rapidly rotating neutron star feeding off of its low-mass companion star, which has created an accretion disk around the neutron star. This neutron star is also a pulsar, emitting powerful twin beams of light from its opposing <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/magnetic+poles\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">magnetic poles<\/a> as it rotates, spinning like a lighthouse beacon.<\/p>\n<p>The J1023 system is rare and valuable to study because the pulsar transitions clearly between its active state, in which it feeds off its companion star, and a more dormant state, when it emits detectable pulsations as radio waves. This makes it a \u201ctransitional millisecond pulsar.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An international team of astronomers has uncovered new evidence to explain how pulsing remnants of exploded stars interact with surrounding matter deep in the cosmos, using observations from NASA\u2019s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) and other telescopes. Scientists based in the U.S., Italy, and Spain, set their sights on a mysterious cosmic duo called PSR [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217999\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}