Though the pulsar is just 12 miles across, it weighs twice as much as the sun.
It would be nice to test this directly by measuring the magnetic field of a pulsar.
Three years ago a team at Jodrell Bank found a double pulsar, a milestone in astronomy.
Particles such as these have been detected previously in supernova remnants and pulsar nebulae.
That is good enough to look at whatever is producing the pulsar's radio waves.
X-ray pulsar being spun up, and the theory rested on titbits of circumstantial evidence.
The gravity on the pulsar's surface is 300 billion times as great as the gravity on Earth.
The pulsar and white dwarf pair emit gravitational waves and the binary star system gradually loses energy.
"It could be a typical pulsar, and we still wouldn't be able to detect it, " Tomsick said.
MSN: Runaway star may be fastest pulsar yet - Technology & science - Space - Space.com | NBC News
X-ray pulsar that spins fast enough to become a millisecond pulsar once it has consumed its accretion disc.
Spotting such radio pulses would be more evidence that this specimen is destined to become a millisecond pulsar.
Another would be to slow a pulsar's spin down in pretty short order.
These leave behind a dense object known as a pulsar, which forms from the core of the exploding star.
This region, whose composition and relationship to the pulsar remain unknown, is a mere 500km long and 250km across.
Once the change was taken into account, though, the researchers located the pulsar.
This oddball pulsar was discovered only by harnessing the analysis power of new algorithms on the superfast ATLAS computer cluster.
Dr Gwinn's telescopes are in South Africa and Australia, and the first thing he has pointed them at is the Vela pulsar.
That may be large compared with the pulsar, but on the cosmic scale it is minuscule about the size of a biggish asteroid.
At least, this is what happens to a pulsar that is the remains of a lonely, companionless star such as the sun.
Thus it is that a neutron star in a binary star system gets to spend its retirement years as a millisecond radio pulsar.
To today's pulsar astronomer, who has seen it all, even swirling ultra-hot discs surrounding the remnants of extreme stellar violence are old hat.
Its companion is a pulsar, which spins 25 times every second.
The received wisdom suggests that such ditherers should be old it would take billions of years to slow down that much from the dizzy pace of pulsar youth.
These are all plausible explanations for individual cases, but it stretches credulity to believe that they can account for all the pulsar-free remnants that have now been discovered.
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.
But the slow decay in radiation intensity from a tabletop pulsar would make possible extremely long-range transmitters, giving far-off space probes an energy-efficient way to beam information back to earth.
X-ray millisecond pulsar has proved puzzlingly slow and drawn-out.
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
应用推荐