Ms. JOCELYN BELL BURNELL (Neutron Star Specialist): I think this microphone is working okay.
Further catastrophe awaits the remaining, ordinary star if it orbits the neutron star too closely.
Sometimes such an association survives even after one of the stars explodes and leaves behind a neutron star.
That, she says, suggests the burst came from a single neutron star just a few hundred light years away.
For then, over time, the neutron star gradually consumes its companion's outer layers.
In this scenario, the gamma ray burst was caused by a large, comet-like object that fell into a neutron star.
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There, the starry guts spiral down to the neutron star's surface, heating to over a billion degrees as they go.
Thus it is that a neutron star in a binary star system gets to spend its retirement years as a millisecond radio pulsar.
In fact, the only way the pulses could have been seen with the current observations would be if the flashing neutron star was excessively bright.
MSN: Runaway star may be fastest pulsar yet - Technology & science - Space - Space.com | NBC News
The neutron star's intense gravity raises fearsome tides on its partner's surface, tearing material off and pulling it into a disc around the neutron star.
Pulsars are a special type of neutron star that rotates rapidly, emitting a beam of high-energy that spins much like the bulb in a lighthouse.
MSN: Runaway star may be fastest pulsar yet - Technology & science - Space - Space.com | NBC News
So if we see the positrons coming from a particular direction, it means astrophysics like a pulsar (a type of neutron star) is responsible for the signal, not dark matter.
Knowing that the supernova is 15, 000 years old, and logging the distance the neutron star had traveled in that time, Tomsick and his team were able to calculate its speed.
MSN: Runaway star may be fastest pulsar yet - Technology & science - Space - Space.com | NBC News
In this case the source would have to be something far more exotic, such as a neutron star being swallowed by a black hole or colliding with another neutron star.
But the scientists are confident the object is a pulsar, rather than a regular neutron star, because of its high-energy emission and the fact that it doesn't show up in optical wavelengths.
MSN: Runaway star may be fastest pulsar yet - Technology & science - Space - Space.com | NBC News
Since the inner part of the accretion disc orbits faster than once a second, as the hot gas ploughs into the neutron star's surface, it torques the star up to ever higher speeds.
Dr Ardavan is confident that, if the machine can be coaxed into doing this, it will radiate in exactly the way he predicts, providing a tuneable and compact source of high-frequency microwaves in effect, a tabletop pulsar, without the neutron star.
After analyzing the data, one team of scientists has concluded that the most likely scenario for this gamma ray burst is that it was the result of a collision between two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole.
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It's now set for launch in 2017, when it will be joined by the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an addition to the International Space Station also selected as part of the Explorer program last week that will use a process called X-ray timing to study neutron stars.
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Depending on its initial mass, it might collapse to a compact hot star known as a white dwarf (when the star's mass is less than 1.4 times the mass of our sun) or to a neutron star (for stars 1.4 to about three times the mass of our sun) or to a black hole (for stars more massive than three times the mass of our sun).
It was that pulsars are rotating neutron stars, the super-dense last stage of collapse of a star not quite heavy enough to form a black hole.
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