{"id":26108,"date":"2023-08-30T08:00:53","date_gmt":"2023-08-30T12:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=26108"},"modified":"2023-08-29T14:36:10","modified_gmt":"2023-08-29T18:36:10","slug":"eso-explaining-the-ups-and-downs-in-a-pulsars-brightness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=26108","title":{"rendered":"ESO: Explaining the ups and downs in a pulsar’s brightness"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new report from the European Southern Observatory (ESO<\/a>):<\/p>\n

ESO telescopes help unravel pulsar puzzle<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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This artist\u2019s impression shows the pulsar PSR J1023+0038 stealing gas from its companion star. This gas accumulates in a disc around the pulsar, slowly falls towards it, and is eventually expelled in a narrow jet. In addition, there is a wind of particles blowing away from the pulsar, represented here by a cloud of very small dots. This wind clashes with the infalling gas, heating it up and making the system glow brightly in X-rays and ultraviolet and visible light. Eventually, blobs of this hot gas are expelled along the jet, and the pulsar returns to the initial, fainter state, repeating the cycle. This pulsar has been observed to switch incessantly between these two states every few seconds or minutes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With a remarkable observational campaign that involved 12 telescopes both on the ground and in space, including three European Southern Observatory (ESO) facilities, astronomers have uncovered the strange behaviour of a pulsar, a super-fast-spinning dead star. This mysterious object is known to switch between two brightness modes almost constantly, something that until now has been an enigma. But astronomers have now found that sudden ejections of matter from the pulsar over very short periods are responsible for the peculiar switches.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have witnessed extraordinary cosmic events where enormous amounts of matter, similar to cosmic cannonballs, are launched into space within a very brief time span of tens of seconds from a small, dense celestial object rotating at incredibly high speeds,\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

says Maria Cristina Baglio, researcher at New York University Abu Dhabi, affiliated with the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), and the lead author of the paper published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics<\/em>.<\/p>\n