All articles tagged with #pulsars
A BuzzFeed list highlights 11 mind‑blowing space facts—from Eratosthenes’ ancient Earth measurement and the Sun’s energetic core to pulsars that could act as galactic GPS and the Andromeda collision—showing just how vast, strange, and humbling the universe is.
Voyager's Golden Record cover encodes a pulsar map and a hydrogen time standard to locate the Sun and roughly date the message, designed to work without a shared human language. Fourteen pulsars provide directional clocks (with a fifteenth pointing to the Galactic center for orientation), and a uranium-238 patch offers an independent age check. The scheme relies on interpretation and the galaxy's motion over time, reflecting a compact, language-free cosmic address with built-in redundancies and caveats.
Astronomers using the MeerKAT telescope detected faint radio pulses from the central compact object 1E 1207.4-5209—the Blue Eye Pulsar—located about 10,000 light-years away in the Milky Way. The neutron star emits radio waves every 424 milliseconds, matching its rotation and suggesting that some radio-quiet central compact objects can produce detectable radio emission under certain magnetic-field conditions, possibly triggered by a 2015 spin glitch. The finding implies a larger population of ultra-faint pulsars in the galaxy and could help explain missing pulsars in some supernova remnants, with the study published in Nature Astronomy on June 25.
Using machine learning on more than a million simulated gamma-ray observations, researchers test whether the Galactic Center Excess—the Milky Way’s central gamma-ray glow—could come from self-annihilating dark matter or from many faint pulsars. They find pulsars would have to be far more numerous and dim than previously thought, making them hard to distinguish from a dark-matter signal, so dark matter remains a plausible but unproven explanation; the bright, crowded galactic center makes definitive conclusions difficult.
Caltech’s Deep Synoptic Array will be built in Nevada’s White Pine County as a 1,650-dish radio telescope network designed to survey the sky 100 times faster and produce sharper radio images, enabling precise localization of radio sources for follow-up by optical, infrared and X-ray observatories; funded by Schmidt Sciences, with prototype dishes already built and construction planned to begin next year and finish by 2029.
The article explains that the Voyager Golden Record carries two dating methods: a uranium-238 patch acting as a long-lived clock (half-life ~4.51 billion years) to measure how long the record has drifted since placement, and a pulsar map encoded on the cover that provides a second, independent time stamp via the regular pulsar periods. Together they let any finder, even without human context, determine the record’s age; the clock’s timescale dwarfs the disc’s expected survival, and while the odds of recovery are tiny, the clocks are designed to outlive the civilization that created them. Voyager is not aimed at any particular star and will remain adrift for millennia, with milestones like 24-hour light-time delays illustrating the probe’s great distance from Earth.
Pioneer 10 carries a gold plaque showing a man and a woman alongside a pulsar-based map meant to mark Earth’s location for any finder; the spacecraft has been silent since 2003 and is now drifting outward toward Aldebaran, a journey NASA estimates at about two million years, though the star’s own motion means it isn’t a fixed rendezvous. The plaque was designed as a durable, albeit uncertain, message to distant intelligences, and while the craft may fade, the plaque’s intended message endures as a symbol of human curiosity.
A comprehensive review of 65 observations from pulsars, active galaxies, and gamma-ray bursts tightens the limits on any energy-dependent variation in photon speed, finding no violation of Lorentz invariance and reinforcing Einstein’s relativity; it also refines how such limits are calculated and points to future instruments for even tighter tests.
The Voyager Golden Record on each spacecraft carries two built-in clocks—a tiny uranium-238 sample on the cover to date its age by radioactive decay, and a pulsar map to date it via the slowdowns of 14 pulsars—providing two independent ways to estimate how long the record has drifted and offering redundancy on a timescale of hundreds of millions to billions of years.
Astronomers are chasing exotrojans—hypothetical bodies that could orbit pulsars at Lagrange points—by cross-checking optical light curves with pulsar radio timing and analyzing NANOGrav data; so far no conclusive detections, two signals were false positives, and no object bigger than Earth has been found in seven systems, though one showed hints of a body up to eight Jupiter masses, leaving the search open for future data.
Sir Francis Graham-Smith, a pioneering figure in radio astronomy and former Astronomer Royal, passed away at 102. His groundbreaking work in radio surveys, pulsar studies, and his leadership at Jodrell Bank significantly advanced our understanding of the universe, including the identification of distant galaxies and the development of major radio telescopes. He was a highly influential scientist, author, and leader in British astronomy, recognized with numerous honors including a knighthood and the Royal Medal.
A new technique for detecting Dyson rings, theoretical megastructures designed to harness energy from stars, has been proposed by scientists. The method involves analyzing light curves from pulsars, where the pulsar beam striking a Dyson ring could create detectable features. This approach could help identify advanced civilizations capable of constructing such structures, which are more feasible than Dyson spheres due to lower material requirements. The research is set to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
New research suggests that the high velocities of stars in Omega Centauri, the Milky Way's largest star cluster, are likely due to a cluster of stellar-mass black holes rather than a single intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH). By combining data on stellar velocities and pulsar accelerations, scientists from the University of Surrey and collaborators have provided evidence favoring the presence of multiple smaller black holes. This finding helps resolve a long-standing debate and advances the search for IMBHs, which could bridge the gap between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes.
Using data from the now-collapsed Arecibo radio telescope, SETI scientists have studied how pulsar signals are distorted by the interstellar medium, revealing that current models of the universe may need revision. This research, led by Sofia Sheikh, highlights the importance of archived data and its role in understanding cosmic phenomena like gravitational waves. The findings suggest that galactic structures, such as the Milky Way's spiral arms, influence these distortions, which could refine gravitational wave detection methods.
Astronomers using the MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array have detected a surprisingly loud gravitational wave background, suggesting more supermassive black holes may be orbiting each other than previously thought. This discovery, made by observing 83 pulsars, has led to the most detailed maps of gravitational waves, revealing a 'hot spot' of activity in the Southern Hemisphere. The findings challenge existing theories about the number of supermassive black holes and could provide insights into the cosmic architecture of the universe.