Bizarre pulsar just gets stranger
— -- Pulsars are like cosmic lighthouses sending out sweeping beams that blink at us across the galactic expanse. Now scientists have spotted a wacky pulsar that doesn't behave exactly like its fellows: Instead of circling a white dwarf star, this one orbits a sun-like star along an oval path.
All other known pulsars that rotate as quickly as this one seem to have picked up speed by pulling off mass from a companion star that has reached the advanced stage of red giant, when its gaseous layers bloat out prior to the end-stage of life as a very compact, dim, white dwarf.
"The fact that it's around a sun-like star is fascinating because if that is the companion to this pulsar, then it certainly didn't accrete matter from that star — it hasn't been a red giant yet," said David Champion, an astronomer at Canada's McGill University.
To account for this odd duck, called PSR J1903+0327, scientists have concocted a few new ideas, including the possibility that the pulsar originated in a globular cluster with a different companion, but was kicked out by a near-miss with another star.
"The reason why we're so excited about this is the impact it might have on our understanding of where the pulsars that we look at are coming from," Champion told SPACE.com. "We've never seen anything like this before."
Champion and his colleagues detail their findings in the May 15 issue of the journal Science.
Quite a surprise
Pulsars are thought to form when a massive star reaches the end of its life and explodes in a supernova. The remnants of these stars sometimes collapse into neutron stars, so-called because they are so dense that the protons and electrons that formed the star's atoms have been squashed into neutrons (if the original star was even more massive, it would collapse into a black hole).
Not only is the star's matter tightly-packed after all this squashing, but the star's magnetic field is compressed into a tiny space as well. Scientists think this powerful field accelerates charged particles around the star, causing them to emit radiation that is focused into a beam by the magnetic field lines.
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