Crab Pulsar’s high-energy beam surprises astronomers
They found emissions at more than 100 gigaelectronvolts – 100 billion times more energetic than visible light.
The Crab Nebula that hosts the pulsar continues to amaze astronomers, despite being one of the most studied objects.
The remnant of a supernova that lit up the skies on Earth in 1054, it has been taken in modern times to be a constant source of light – so constant that telescopes were trained on it for calibrations.
But earlier this year, the Crab was spotted emitting gamma-ray flares that have confounded astronomers.
Within the nebula lies the Crab Pulsar – a tiny, rapidly spinning neutron star that sprays highly energetic electromagnetic rays out at its poles like a lighthouse beam,sacs louis vuitton sweeping past the Earth 30 times a second.
The pulsar’s enormous magnetic field is known to gather up particles and accelerate them – in a process much like particle accelerators here on Earth.
As those particles move in curved paths, they emit the gamma rays that we can measure.
Models reshaped
The new find complicates the story further, because that more steady beat of pulsar emissions seems to contain higher energies than was ever expected.
Current models of this process put an upper limit on just how energetic the photons will be.
But Nepomuk Otte of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics in California said that results from the Fermi space telescope suggested the Crab Pulsar might hold a surprise.
Fermi only measures gamma rays up to an energy of 20 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), but there were hints in the data that the pulsar might have more energetic particles that were not being caught.
“If you were more optimistic, and asked yourself ‘is it also possible that with these data there should be more emission above 100 GeV’, the answer was a clear yes… even though the models didn’t expect that,” Dr Otte told the Science podcast.
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