The Crab Pulsar is nothing but the corpse left from the moment when the star that created the Crab Nebula exploded as a supernova. It is 1.5 times the mass of the Sun, about 10 kilometers in diameter, and rotates about 30 times per second. Furthermore, it is surrounded by a region of extremely intense magnetic field: 10 billion times stronger than that of the Sun. It is the most powerful pulsar in our galaxy (and it is one of the few pulsars detected at all wavelengths).
It is so strong that it dominates the movement of charges in the magnetosphere and forces them to rotate at the same speed. This rotation of the magnetic field generates intense electric fields that tear the electrons from the surface, producing beams of radiation that we receive each time the beam crosses our line of sight, as if it were a cosmic lighthouse.
Now, a team of scientists from the MAGIC ( Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov ) observatory, a land-based gamma-ray instrument located on the Canary Island of La Palma (Spain) has discovered the most energetic emission of radiation ever detected from the The neutron star at the center of the 1054 supernova , which we just named the Crab pulsar.
“ The new observations extend this limit (radiation photons) much higher, above the TeV (electron volt) energies, that is, several times more energy than the previous measurement, violating all the models of the theory considered in the I work on neutron stars ”, explains Roberta Zanin, co-author of the study.
“ Since the beginning of the MAGIC experiment operation in 2004, we have been observing the Crab Nebula and the Crab pulsar intensively. Thanks to this we reveal significant characteristics of this enigmatic object . MAGIC has been designed to be the most suitable instrument for making these types of observations ”, clarifies Razmik Mirzoyan from the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich (Germany).
The study has been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
