The European Space Agency has published the discovery of the brightest and most distant pulsar in the universe. It is up to 1,000 times brighter than previously thought possible . The discovery was made possible by data from ESA’s XMM-Newton telescope.
As if this were not enough, the pulsar, a small but high density neutron star that rotates at high speed and has a very intense magnetic field that causes the radiation emitted by the star to be concentrated along a beam at the electromagnetic poles (or a rotating neutron star, for simplicity ), is also the most distant detected to date.
This X-ray source is the brightest of its kind detected so far, as it is 10 times brighter than the object that held the first place on this scale . To give an example of how imposing this object is, it is capable of emitting in a single second the same amount of energy that our Sun releases in more than 3 years.
The signal from this pulsar, apart from having been observed by the XMM-Newton telescope, had also been detected in archival data from NASA’s Nustar telescope , which has offered some more information.
“Before it was believed that the only ones capable of reaching these extraordinary luminosities were black holes at least ten times more massive than our Sun, feeding on their companion stars. However, the rapid and regular pulsations of this source clearly indicate that it is from a neutron star and not from a black hole , “says Gian Luca Israel, the study leader.
According to the study, the pulsar’s rotational speed has changed over time , from 1.43 s per rotation in 2003 to 1.13 s in 2014 (on Earth this would make each day five hours shorter). “Only neutron stars are compact enough not to disintegrate when rotating at such speed,” says Luca.
“The discovery of this unusual object, by far the most extreme we have discovered in terms of distance, luminosity and rate of increase in its rotational frequency, constitutes a new milestone for XMM-Newton and is going to change our understanding of how it works. type of objects “, comments Norbert Schartel, co-author of the study.
The work has been published in the journal Science.
