Astronomers have begun to prepare for what may turn out to be one of the most colorful and interesting encounters in our cosmos: a pulsar will coincide in the orbit of a giant star in our Milky Way in 2018 . The finding has been published in the Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society .
Scientists discovered this “small” object (the size of a city) thanks to NASA’s Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope. Subsequently, various observations with the Lovell 76-m radio telescope, led by a team from the University of Manchester (United Kingdom), revealed that the pulsar, dubbed PSR J2032 + 4127 , was traveling in an orbit around a very striking star.
If the size of the pulsar is similar to that of a city on Earth, 20 kilometers in diameter and weighing almost twice as much as the Sun, the star known as MT91 213 is 15 times the mass of the Sun and shines even 10,000 times. more .
According to astronomers’ forecasts, the highly magnetized neutron star is falling very rapidly under the gravitational pull of this massive young star of the Be star type. So much so, that in less than three years the pulsar will pass very close to it, then generating a spectacular series of cosmic explosions that will create a series of radio wave emissions to gamma rays . Fireworks in space.
This very special encounter will not only serve to give us an opportunity to witness a rather rare event but also to reveal crucial information about various topics such as star formation, as a means of measuring the star’s gravity, its magnetic field or even density of the stellar wind flowing from it.
“This is the longest-term binary system known to contain a radio pulsar and provides an excellent opportunity to study these massive stars, important progenitors for supernovae and the sources of many of the heavy elements in the galaxy,” he says. Andrew Lyne, study leader.
