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Pulsar space illustration. | Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
What do you get when you have been staring at the same dead star for over 20 years? Insights on the strangest physics of the universe.
The star PSR J0922+0638 is Pulsar. The pulsaries are the remnants of a neutron star-ya dead star-which quickly rotate and radiate regularly. The pulsaries have some of the most wild physics of space, and matter is compressed to the right to the final collapse into the black hole threshold. The only thing that prevents this catastrophe is the exotic quantum pressure.
A typical pulsar is just a few miles wide, but it contains road solar mass. This is done by the Pulsarsus some densest objects in the universe – the second only by the exclusivity of the black holes. In these extreme density, neutrons and protons crushed to form what forms one giant atomic nucleus. Although physicists have some decent understanding of what the nuclear material does in the dense, in the outermost layers, the neutron star core remains complete secrets.
Due to its extremely high density, the pulsars rotate exceptional regularity. In this case, the rotation period of PSR J0922+0638 is 0.43063 seconds, and it has fundamentally retained that rotation speed for hundreds of thousands of years. But it is not perfect, and astronomers can use detailed observation of that rotational speed change to guess what is happening inside the pulsar.
Recently, astronomers have combined 22 -year -old data from the Nanshan Radio Telescope in China and Meerkat massif in South Africa to see what exact Pulsar time was. It turns out that the PSR J0922+0638 has not been almost perfect in the last two decades.
In their document published in the Preprint Database, Astronomers noted over a dozen “flaws” or sudden changes in rotation speed. Some of them have been spotted earlier, but many of them were completely new. A typical disadvantage changes to a speed of less than a billion coefficient. However, for the Pulsar forces, it shows a huge change in energy. Strangely enough, these drawbacks occurred a bit regularly, repeating about every 550 days.
In addition to sudden flaws, astronomers learned that the rotation speed of the PSR J0922+0638 gradually rose rapidly and slowed down a cycle of about 500-600 days.
The image of the South African Meekat radio telescope array while it was built, the image. | Credit: Ski South Africa
Perhaps this is not a coincidence that the disadvantages of the PSR J0922+0638 corresponded to the same cycle as the slow changes in its rotational speed. Astronomers are not absolutely sure what causes changes, but they pointed out some possible explanations.
Pulsaries have extremely strong magnetic fields that can store and release energy. Thus, perhaps the PSR J0922+0638 is experiencing something like a magnetic cycle on the sun where it passes to the alternating periods of strong and weak sunlight, the authors suggested.
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Another explanation may be that there is an exotic superfluid of the main particles in the deep pulsar core. Hiding in that superfluide can change the rotation speed of the entire star, and when the fluid has shifted directions, it can lead to deficiency.
After all, we do not understand where the disturbances come from, or exactly what is happening in the pulsaries. But they both have to be somehow tied, and they will only find out carefully, dedicated observations.