Astrophysicists Clock Highest-Radiation Blasts Ever Recorded From a Pulsar

[Judi Lynn]

Vela is nearly 1,000 light-years from Earth and is spewing astonishingly energetic gamma-rays into space.
By
Kevin Hurler
PublishedYesterday

- click for image -

https://i.kinja-img.com/image/upload/c_fit,f_auto,g_center,q_60,w_1315/d1c1ae64580317c07df35ad098035405.jpg

An artist’s impression of the Vela pulsar. Illustration: Science Communication Lab for DESY

Pulsars are one of the strangest celestial bodies in space. These cosmic lighthouses emit periodic bursts of radiation from their magnetic poles, and now a team of researchers claim they have detected the largest burst ever recorded from a pulsar.

A global collaboration of scientists used the H.E.S.S. Observatory in Namibia to observe a pulsar emitting bursts of gamma-rays with energies as high as 20 tera-electronvolts, which is about 10 trillion times more energetic than visible light. The emissions are coming from a pulsar known as Vela nearly 1,000 light-years from Earth. This massive object spins 11 times per second, flashing at us like a rapidly blinking light. The researchers say the bursts they recorded are a whopping 200 times more energetic than any pulsar beam previously documented. Their work is published today in Nature Astronomy.

“This result challenges our previous knowledge of pulsars and requires a rethinking of how these natural accelerators work,” said the team’s leader, Arache Djannati-Atai from the Astroparticle & Cosmology Laboratory in France, in a DESY press release. “The traditional scheme according to which particles are accelerated along magnetic field lines within or slightly outside the magnetosphere cannot sufficiently explain our observations.”

A pulsar is a type of neutron star, which is one of the new lives a star can take on when it implodes, assuming it doesn’t collapse all the way into a black hole. A pulsar is incredibly dense and features a highly active magnetosphere, through which electrons accelerate only to be ejected in a beam from one of the star’s poles. These jets then sweep across the universe as the pulsar spins, appearing as flashes in regular intervals to viewers on Earth, much like a lighthouse would appear to a sailor at sea.

More:
https://gizmodo.com/highest-energy-pulsar-gamma-ray-vela-space-1850900325

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Vela is the name of a constellation, not a pulsar. The pulsar is "in" Vega, as viewed from Earth.

"Vela is nearly 1,000 light-years from Earth" is simply nonsensical.