Probably the most powerful pulsar ever discovered could have just shed its mask and announced its presence on the scene.
Pulsars are spinning neutron stars, the dense remnants of formerly giant stars which have gone supernova, and their enormous magnetic fields power regular radio bursts which are among the many brightest signals within the sky.
However the pulsar VT 1137-0337 didn’t show up on radio telescope surveys as recently as 1998. It wasn’t until 2018 that the pulsar’s bursts showed up within the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) Sky Survey (VLASS), and it’s shown up each time astronomers have looked since.
There’s two reasons for the recent emergence of the pulsar, in line with research presented Wednesday on the 240th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California. The primary is the pulsar’s age.
“Based on its characteristics, this can be a very young pulsar,” Caltech professor of astronomy Gregg Hallinan said in an announcement, “possibly as young as only 14 years, but no older than 60 to 80 years.”
The opposite reason is that until recently, the pulsar was hidden from view by the stays of the enormous star that exploded before forming the pulsar. The star stuff violently thrown outward by the supernova explosion was blocking the radio bursts until the fabric — the vast majority of the mass of the previous star — had traveled outward and thinned enough to permit the signal to go through.
It’s a configuration referred to as a pulsar wind nebula, probably the most famous example of which is probably going the crab nebula, the results of a supernova explosion within the constellation Taurus within the 12 months 1054.
“The item we now have found appears to be roughly 10,000 times more energetic than the Crab, with a stronger magnetic field,” Caltech graduate student in astronomy Dillon Dong, who participated within the research, said in an announcement. “It likely is an emerging ‘super Crab.’”
VLASS is a program launched by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in 2017 with a mission to survey 80% of the sky within the radio spectrum. Dong and Dr Hallinan studied the VLASS data and located VT 1137-0337 in a dwarf galaxy about 395 million light years from Earth.
“This one stood out because its galaxy is experiencing a burst of star formation, and likewise due to the characteristics of its radio emission,” Dong said.
VT 1137-0337 is so powerful, it may also qualify as a magnetar, neutron star pulsars with much more fiercely powerful magnetic fields than is typical. Magnetars are little understood, but astronomers theorize they may very well be behind the enigmatic bursts of radio energy seen within the sky and referred to as fast radio bursts, or FRBs.
One and a technique or one other, Dong added, VT 1137-0337 may become connected to the mystery of FRBs as well.
“Our discovery of a really similar source switching on suggests that the radio sources related to FRBs also could also be luminous pulsar wind nebulae,” he said.
