The LOFAR radio telescope has identified a pulsar rotating at 42,000 times per minute, an astonishingly high speed, although it does not exceed (just barely) the fastest pulsar ever detected: PSR J1748-2446, which reaches almost 43,000 times per minute. Theoretically, a pulsar could rotate 72,000 times per minute.
The detected pulsar has been named PSR J0952-0607 (or J0952 for short) and is classified as a millisecond pulsar. It is between 3,200 and 5,700 light years distant in the constellation Sextans.
The mysterious pulsars
When the most massive stars use up their fuel they crush all their mass into the densest matter that exists, to the point where electrons fuse with protons, thus transforming into neutrons .
So we are looking at a neutron star . A neutron star fragment the size of a sugar cube (about a cubic centimeter) contains the same amount of mass as the entire human population, so its density is unimaginable.
A pulsar is a neutron star that emits periodic radiation. Pulsars have an intense magnetic field that induces the emission of these pulses of electromagnetic radiation at regular intervals related to the period of rotation of the object. The rotating magnetic field powers beams of radio waves, visible light, X-rays, and gamma rays.
Jocelyn Bell, the first person to identify a pulsar.The pulsar found by LOFAR, a low-frequency radio telescope located in the Netherlands, contains approximately 1.4 times the mass of the Sun and is orbited every 6.4 hours by a companion star that has been reduced to less than 20 times the mass of the planet. Jupiter. As the lead author of the find, Cees Bassa , explains at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON):
LOFAR collected pulses from J0952 at radio frequencies around 135 MHz, which is 45 percent lower than the lower frequencies of conventional radio searches. We found that J0952 has a very pronounced radio spectrum, which means that its radio pulses fade very quickly at higher frequencies. It would have been a challenge to find it without LOFAR.
The first pulsar was detected by a Cambridge astronomer named Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967. At first, astronomers thought that the regular pulses could be signals from aliens. Pulsars were jokingly called LGMs (short for Little Green Men).