{"id":96548,"date":"2019-09-22T09:43:12","date_gmt":"2019-09-22T16:43:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/the-2nd-fastest-pulsar-now-with-gamma-rays"},"modified":"2019-09-22T09:43:12","modified_gmt":"2019-09-22T16:43:12","slug":"the-2nd-fastest-pulsar-now-with-gamma-rays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/the-2nd-fastest-pulsar-now-with-gamma-rays","title":{"rendered":"The 2nd-fastest pulsar, now with gamma rays"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Supernova explosions can crush ordinary stars into neutron stars<\/a>, composed of exotic, extremely dense matter. Neutron stars are on the order of about 12 miles (20 km) across in contrast to hundreds of thousands of miles across for stars like our sun. Yet they contain mass on the order of 1.4 times that of our sun. Neutron stars have strong magnetic fields. They emit powerful blasts of radiation along their magnetic field lines. If, as a neutron star spins, its beams of radiation periodically point towards Earth, we see the star as a pulsing radio or gamma-ray source. Then the neutron star is also called a pulsar<\/a>, often compared to a cosmic lighthouse<\/a>. Modern astronomers know of pulsars spinning with mind-boggling rapidity. The second-fastest one \u2013 called PSR J0952-0607 \u2013 spins some 707 times a second! Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hanover, Germany announced<\/a> on September 19, 2019, that this pulsar, J0952-0607 \u2013 formerly seen only at the radio end of the spectrum \u2013 now has been found to pulse also in gamma rays.<\/p>\n

J0952-0607 \u2013 the number relates to the object\u2019s position in the sky \u2013 was first discovered in 2017. It was originally seen to pulse in radio waves, but not gamma rays. The international team that studied it in detail \u2013 and recently published<\/a> new work about it in the peer-reviewed Astrophysical Journal<\/em> \u2013 said in a statement<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The pulsar rotates 707 times in a single second and is therefore the fastest spinning in our galaxy outside the dense stellar environments of globular clusters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Supernova explosions can crush ordinary stars into neutron stars, composed of exotic, extremely dense matter. Neutron stars are on the order of about 12 miles (20 km) across in contrast to hundreds of thousands of miles across for stars like our sun. Yet they contain mass on the order of 1.4 times that of our [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96548","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\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}