Roughly a year ago, astronomers announced that they had observed an object that shouldn’t exist. Like a pulsar, it emitted regularly timed bursts of radio emissions. But unlike a pulsar, those bursts were separated by over 20 minutes. If the 22-minute gap between bursts represents the rotation period of the object, then it is rotating too slowly to produce radio emissions by any known mechanism.
Now, some of the same team (along with new collaborators) are back with the discovery of something that, if anything, is acting even more oddly. The new source of radio bursts, ASKAP J193505.1+214841.0, takes nearly an hour between bursts. And it appears to have three different settings, sometimes producing weaker bursts and sometimes skipping them entirely. While the researchers suspect that, like pulsars, this is also powered by a neutron star, it’s not even clear that it’s the same class of object as their earlier discovery.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
While the researchers suspect that, like pulsars, this is also powered by a neutron star, it’s not even clear that it’s the same class of object as their earlier discovery.
If the neutron star rotates too slowly, then its magnetic field won’t be strong enough to produce radio emissions.
So, it’s thought that if a pulsar’s rotation slows down enough (causing its pulses to be separated by too much time), it will simply shut down, and we’ll stop observing any radio emissions from the object.
The object, ASKAPJ193505.1+214841.0, was discovered by accident when the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope was used to observe the area due to detections of a gamma-ray burst.
To get at this issue, the researchers estimate the strength of the magnetic field needed to produce the larger bursts and come up with a value that’s significantly higher than any previously observed to originate on a white dwarf.
Whether that argues for the earlier source being a neutron star will depend on whether you feel that the two objects represent a single phenomenon despite their somewhat different behaviors.
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