A new measurement of the universe’s only known double pulsar system will allow astrophysicists to test Einstein’s general theory of relativity more stringently than ever before.

 

SYDNEY Australia: About three times a second, a 10,000-year-old stellar corpse sweeps a beam of gamma-rays toward Earth. Discovered by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, this pulsar is the first known to blink in pure gamma rays.

 

“This is the first example of a new class of pulsars that will give us fundamental insights into how stars work,” says Stanford University’s Peter Michelson, principle investigator for the Large Area Telescope, one of the instruments aboard the orbiting observatory.

1,000 times the energy of our Sun

The new pulsar – detailed this week in the U.S. journal Science – lies within a supernova remnant known as CTA 1, located about 4,600 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus.

Its lighthouse-like beam sweeps Earth’s way every 316.86 milliseconds. The pulsar, which formed in a supernova explosion about 10,000 years ago, emits 1,000 times the energy of our Sun.

Pulsars were first discovered in 1967 by a student radio astronomer. The radio pulses recorded were uncannily steady – so much so that some astronomers wondered if they were picking up signals from extraterrestrial civilisations.

The correct explanation was even stranger: Pulsars are spinning neutron stars packing the mass of the Sun into a sphere about 20 km across. Whirling around thousands of times each hour, they beam radio pulses into the cosmos in the style of a rapid-fire lighthouse.

Source: Cosmos – click here for full article