Newly Discovered Neutron Star Pulsates In a Never Before Seen Way

back in early 70s the scientists were really surprised to discover this blinking light you see on the screen this was the first ever pulsar we've discovered the vela pulsar the extremely powerful object a neutron star that seems to generate these very strange pulsations every 1.3 seconds something that back then was very difficult to explain until the scientists realized that neutron stars were real and that they were actually producing these very strange signals pretty much everywhere around the universe but with time as our technology advanced the scientists have started to discover even more unusual posters with more unusual features that are even difficult to explain today and so when it comes to posters and neutral stars there is really no limit to various mysteries in regards to their signals but because they're so predictable and seem to produce these signals at extremely specific intervals they're also an extremely important part of us trying to understand everything in the universe and so today we're going to be talking about this new discovery another unusual neutron star or pulsar that we've never seen before that seems to push the boundaries even more how wonderful person this is anton so let's discuss exactly what the scientists discovered recently and why this particular poster seems to have surprised them so much with the signal coming from this poster visible in this video provided by the university of sydney and by observing this you can maybe even notice that something seems to be really strange first of all it pulsates extremely quickly but also it seems to pulsate with a somewhat different profile compared to other posters in a galaxy but not different enough to be some kind of a new phenomenon yet similar enough to other neutron stars and pulsars that it's very likely just some kind of an evolved state and here it's also important to understand that when it comes to various posters we've discovered so far there is already quite a diversity as a matter of fact not all pulsars can be created by neutron stars there's at least one white dwarf known to produce very similar signals with signals in this case taking approximately two minutes between them this is a system we've discussed in one of the previous videos and it's known as ar score pi but this time the scientists were actually studying vela x1 binary a binary that's known to produce a lot of x-rays using the meerkat telescope in south africa accidentally discovered an unusual pulse that lasted for approximately 0.3 seconds or 300 milliseconds but the flash itself being so much similar to what we expect from a neutron star but not really repeating as much and more importantly still possessing very different characteristics of a typical pulsar or even a magnetar and so the scientists decided to go through the data collected over several years to see if they can actually find other pulses coming from this region and to actually discover what's happening here and they actually did find quite a lot the pulses that were previously missed by the automatic detection system mostly because the system never really looks for these very long pulses something that's longer than 20 to 30 milliseconds and moreover by analyzing the signals they discovered that they were actually repeating extremely accurately with a period being approximately 76 seconds and 76 seconds is a really long time for a pulser the previous record holder was actually 23 seconds and even that was very difficult to explain pretty much every other poster we know usually has a repetition of just a few seconds or possibly even milliseconds they never really have these long periods and so something really unusual was happening around this object and just like some of the other unusual posters we've discovered in the last couple of years it also seemed to possess features of both magnetar and a pulsar and specifically it seemed to produce seven distinctly different pulse shapes with certain poses representing what's known as a quasi-pulse with the signals possessing what's known as polarization suggesting that this is coming from a very highly magnetized object and certain signals possessing what's known as the quasi-period which suggests that there is some kind of oscillation or some kind of a periodic activity happening around this object it could be because something is orbiting around it or it could be because something is disturbing it very very regularly and so because of this diversity in different pulses and because of the intensity of the pulses currently the scientists cannot really explain what's going on here and they obviously cannot explain why this object is pulsating every 76 seconds and not just a few seconds like a typical pulsar and interestingly enough the pulsations here seem to be very very accurate they were even able to predict the next pulsation down to approximately 100 millionth of a second and so the discovery of this unusual object challenges a lot of things we know about posters and potentially presents a completely new phenomenon it's even been detected in a region where we don't really expect any neutron stars that are still active there could be some neutron stars that are silent and have long stopped producing signals a long time ago but discovering a neutron star that produces radio signals was never expected from this region mostly because a lot of stars in this region are actually pretty old and the activity in this region has long stopped producing anything and more intriguingly the signal itself also to some extent resembles fast radio bursts the other mystery we still have trouble solving but in this case it's slightly longer than a typical fast radio burst and also doesn't seem to possess as much energy suggesting that maybe this object is sort of like what happens to fast radial bursts or the sources that produce frbs once they kind of reach the end of their lifetime and all of this could be related to what we usually refer to as a ultra long period magnetar a super powerful but still somewhat hypothetical object that could be responsible for most of the mysteries you're observing either way though this could be the first member of this new class the ultra long period neutron star with magnetic properties which could be the next step in the evolution of ultra long period magnetars that we think it might be responsible for frbs so basically that's sort of like where they end up afterwards this will produce less and less energy and they slowly become less magnetic but there's still quite a lot of unanswered questions even here first of all we obviously have no idea how many of these objects exist in our galaxy right now this is the first one second of all it's unclear how long this object has been active and how long it's going to stay active or how it's going to change over time the scientists behind the paper do suggest that it's about 5.3 million years old but how long is going to remain active is still unclear at the same time because of the inclination toward us the subject is actually only visible about 0.5 percent of its rotational period so even the fact that the scientists were able to find this pulse is extremely lucky further observations though are going to be kind of difficult and that's basically because the jets coming from this object are not really directly pointed toward us they're pointed toward us with a slight inclination nevertheless it's still a pretty exciting discovery because it could actually connect all of these different mysteries were observed in the past few years for all we know that's exactly how fast radio bursts are produced to begin with except that in this case this is sort of the long-term revolution of this object and it could also represent a natural progression for a load of different pulsers or a lot of different magnetars and so for all we know this is just the beginning of the story and the beginning of these exciting explanations that could help us understand the universe better but when it comes to posters they also have a lot of practical use as a matter of fact today they're used in a lot of different fields including fields involving gravitational detectors fields involving the very precise measurements of space-time disturbance or essentially fields involving any kind of a precision mapping as a matter of fact you might already know that the iconic voyeur probes inside of them contain these two golden records and these two records contain what's known as a pulsar map the map to the solar system based on the observations of different pulsars and that's because posters produce extremely accurate navigation maps and also produce extremely accurate clocks something that the scientists are trying to explore here on earth for any future use in regards to navigation around the solar system or even for things like gps that's because pulsar clocks are even more accurate than a typical atomic lock and so if we do start using posters for a lot of different things on planet earth for navigation for communication for measuring time understanding how they evolve and trying to understand what happens inside of them is actually really really important because if suddenly a pulsar changes its pulsations and we can't explain why it did so it might create certain problems for a lot of different technology on the planet but that's of course something we don't really use actively yet even though we use something else from outer space that's just as exciting the vast majority of extremely accurate mapping on the planet is actually done using quasars we don't use stars anymore we don't really use anything else but we do use very precise locations of quasars around the night skies in order to determine where things are on our own planet we've talked about this in one of the previous videos you can probably find it somewhere in the description but we'll talk more about this in some of the future videos as well but also talk about the more important topic here how posters are going to be used in future technologies and so on that note thank you for watching subscribe maybe share this with someone who's learning about space and sciences and come back tomorrow to learn something else support this channel patreon by joining channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description stay wonderful i'll see you tomorrow and as always [Music] do

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 129,331

Keywords: anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, pulsar, neutron star, black widow pulsar, bizarre neutron star, gamma ray, gamma ray pulsar, unusual gamma ray source, dark matter halo, einstein @home, einstein at home, einstein@home, most complex neutron star, gleamoscope, strangest pulsar, black widow, extreme black widow, strange black widow, black widow pulsar sound, black widow neutron star, 76 second pulsar

Id: tEsyG1C5HbU

Length: 11min 5sec (665 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 07 2022