Astronomers have made an exciting new discovery, identifying a newborn pulsar that may be only 14 years old. Scientists were finally able to observe the pulsar after the dense debris and radiant energy emission from the supernova explosion caused the pulsar to eventually become quite thin. This celestial formation is known as the Pulsar Wind Nebula or Pleurion. Found in a dwarf galaxy 395 million light-years away from Earth, the object named VT 1137-0337 was first observed in 2018 via the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS) located in New Mexico, USA. “Based on its characteristics, it is a very young pulsar, possibly only as young as 14 years old, but no older than 60 to 80 years old,” said Greg Hallinan, professor of astronomy at Caltech and identifying the object. said one of the astronomers who did.
“What we’re seeing most likely is a pulsar wind nebula,” Told Hallinan’s PhD student Dillon Dong and co-discoverer of this finding.
Pulsars are a type of neutron Star who is still moving. As a result of this rotation and the extremely heavy density of the neutron star, at least 1.5 times our mass Sunday but narrows to a radius that is only as wide as a city EarthThese celestial bodies are highly magnetized and emit energetic electromagnetic radiation from any of their magnetic poles. These ultra-dense celestial bodies are so dense that a teaspoon of neutron star material would be 900 times heavier than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Neutron stars form when a massive main-class star is compressed under the weight of its own size, when it burns through all the potential fuel in its core and collapses into a single supernova Explosions, some of the brightest and most energetic cosmic events. As a result, most of the formerly massive star’s material is expelled, while the remainder is compressed into a neutron star.
VT 1137-0337 is a particularly strong neutron star, several times more powerful than a similar supernova remnant called the Crab Nebula, which emitted a gamma-ray beam that exceeded the measurement of 100 billion electron volts.
“The object we found appears to be about 10,000 times more energetic than a crab with a strong magnetic field. It is likely to be an emerging ‘Super Crab,'” Dong said.
In fact, VT 1137-0337 may be so powerful that it can be classified as a separate entity entirely – a magnet. Magnetars are pulsars that have a magnetic field that is several magnitudes stronger than ordinary pulsars. But not much is known about magnetars, other than theories about magnetars as the origin of mysterious bursts of radio energy. loud radio burst, or FRB. But the discovery of VT 1137-0337 may shed some light on that aspect as well.
“Our discovery of a very similar source switching suggests that radio sources associated with FRBs may also be luminous pulsar wind nebulae,” Dong explained.