Monday, February 6, 2012

Recycling Pulsars – The Millisecond Matters…

Recycling Pulsars – The Millisecond Matters…:

An artist's impression of an accreting X-ray millisecond pulsar. The flowing material from the companion star forms a disk around the neutron star which is truncated at the edge of the pulsar magnetosphere. Credit: NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center / Dana Berry

It’s a millisecond pulsar… a rapidly rotating neutron star and it’s about to reach the end of its mass gathering phase. For ages the vampire of this binary system has been sucking matter from a donor star. It has been busy, spinning at incredibly high rotational speeds of about 1 to 10 milliseconds and shooting off X-rays. Now, something is about to happen. It is going to lose a whole lot of energy and age very quickly. (...)
Read the rest of Recycling Pulsars – The Millisecond Matters… (551 words)



No comments:

Post a Comment