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06-10-2023, 11:39 AM
Andrew Griffin
12 hours ago
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The burst of gamma rays, originating in a dead star known as a pulsar, is the most high energy of its kind ever seen. It was equivalent about ten trillion times the energy of visible light, or 20 tera-electronvolts.
Scientists are unable to explain exactly what kind of a scenario could lead a pulsar to emit such intense energy, and the researchers behind the breakthrough say that it “requires a rethinking of how these natural accelerators work”.
......
Pulsars are formed when a star dies, exploding in a supernova and leaving behind a tiny, dead star. They are just 20 kilometres across, and spin extremely fast with a powerful magnetic field.
“These dead stars are almost entirely made up of neutrons and are incredibly dense: a teaspoon of their material has a mass of more than five billion tonnes, or about 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza,”
......
“That is about 200 times more energetic than all radiation ever detected before from this object,” said co-author Christo Venter from the North-West University in South Africa. Scientists don’t know exactly how that could happen.
“This result challenges our previous knowledge of pulsars and requires a rethinking of how these natural accelerators work,” says Arache Djannati-Atai from the Astroparticle & Cosmology (APC) laboratory in France, who led the research. “The traditional scheme according to which particles are accelerated along magnetic field lines within or slightly outside the magnetosphere cannot sufficiently explain our observations.
https://www.independent.co.uk/space/star...24698.html
12 hours ago
......
The burst of gamma rays, originating in a dead star known as a pulsar, is the most high energy of its kind ever seen. It was equivalent about ten trillion times the energy of visible light, or 20 tera-electronvolts.
Scientists are unable to explain exactly what kind of a scenario could lead a pulsar to emit such intense energy, and the researchers behind the breakthrough say that it “requires a rethinking of how these natural accelerators work”.
......
Pulsars are formed when a star dies, exploding in a supernova and leaving behind a tiny, dead star. They are just 20 kilometres across, and spin extremely fast with a powerful magnetic field.
“These dead stars are almost entirely made up of neutrons and are incredibly dense: a teaspoon of their material has a mass of more than five billion tonnes, or about 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza,”
......
“That is about 200 times more energetic than all radiation ever detected before from this object,” said co-author Christo Venter from the North-West University in South Africa. Scientists don’t know exactly how that could happen.
“This result challenges our previous knowledge of pulsars and requires a rethinking of how these natural accelerators work,” says Arache Djannati-Atai from the Astroparticle & Cosmology (APC) laboratory in France, who led the research. “The traditional scheme according to which particles are accelerated along magnetic field lines within or slightly outside the magnetosphere cannot sufficiently explain our observations.
https://www.independent.co.uk/space/star...24698.html
