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Pulsars

New Exoplanet-Hunting Mission to launch in 2017

April 10, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Move over Kepler. NASA has recently green-lighted two new missions as part of its Astrophysics Explorer Program. These come as the result of four proposals submitted in 2012. The most anticipated and high profile mission is TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. [...]

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Pulsar Jackpot Scours Old Data for New Discoveries

February 27, 2013

Chalk another one up for Citizen Science.  Earlier this month, researchers announced the discovery of 24 new pulsars. To date, thousands of pulsars have been discovered, but what’s truly fascinating about this month’s discovery is that came from culling through old data using a new method. Remove this ad

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The Vela Pulsar as a Spirograph

February 27, 2013

I loved my Spirograph when I was young, and obviously Eric Charles, a physicist with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope team did too. Charles has taken data from Fermi’s Large Area Telescope and turned it into a mesmerizing movie of the Vela Pulsar. It actually is a reflection of the complex motion of the spacecraft [...]

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Gamma-ray Outbursts Shed New Light on Pulsars

June 15, 2012

Researchers using the Large Area Telescope onboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have developed a new method to detect a special class of stellar remnant, known as pulsars. A pulsar is a special type of neutron star, which spin hundreds of times per second. When the intense spin is combined with beams of energy caused [...]

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Recycling Pulsars – The Millisecond Matters…

February 4, 2012

It’s a millisecond pulsar… a rapidly rotating neutron star and it’s about to reach the end of its mass gathering phase. For ages the vampire of this binary system has been sucking matter from a donor star. It has been busy, spinning at incredibly high rotational speeds of about 1 to 10 milliseconds and shooting [...]

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