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.
“We 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,” 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.
A pulsar is a fast-rotating, magnetic, dead star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation into space. As it rotates, this beam sweeps across the cosmos — much like a lighthouse beam scanning its surroundings — and is detected by astronomers as it intersects the line of sight to Earth. This makes the star appear to pulse in brightness as seen from our planet.
PSR J1023+0038, or J1023 for short, is a special type of pulsar with a bizarre behaviour. Located about 4500 light-years away in the Sextans constellation, it closely orbits another star. Over the past decade, the pulsar has been actively pulling matter off this companion, which accumulates in a disc around the pulsar and slowly falls towards it.
Since this process of accumulating matter began, the sweeping beam virtually vanished and the pulsar started incessantly switching between two modes. In the ‘high’ mode, the pulsar gives off bright X-rays, ultraviolet and visible light, while in the…
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