There may be more neutron stars in the Galaxy than we thought

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-05-31 01:00

Australia; NSW

Kevin Gill, Flickr https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Strange new radio signals from a neutron star suggest there could be far more neutron stars in the Galaxy than we thought. Neutron stars are created when giant stars die and their cores collapse. As they spin they can emit radio signals which last from a few milliseconds up to around 23.5 seconds, and as they age they spin more slowly before their radio emission are expected to stop. But Australian and international researchers have now discovered a neutron star that emits radio pulses every 76 seconds - almost 3 times longer than the normal range. The authors say this might suggest that we have been missing similar stars in our searches of the Galaxy or that neutron stars might keep emitting radio waves for longer than we thought.

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Journal/
conference: Nature Astronomy

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: The University of Sydney, ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3D (ASTRO 3D), CSIRO

Funder: This manuscript makes use of MeerKAT (Project ID: DDT-20210125-MC-01) and Parkes (Project ID: PX071) data. M.C. thanks South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) for the approval of the MeerKAT DDT request and the science operations, Control and Monitoring/Central BeamFormer (CAM/CBF) and operator teams for their time and effort invested in the observations. The MeerKAT telescope is operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is a facility of the National Research Foundation, an agency of the Department of Science and Innovation. The Parkes Radio Telescope (Murriyang) is managed by CSIRO. We acknowledge the Wiradjuri people as the traditional owners of the Parkes observatory site. M.C. thanks the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) for scheduling observations with the Parkes radio telescope. The SALT observations were obtained under the SALT Large Science Programme on transients (2018-2-LSP-001; PI: D.B.), which is also supported by Poland under grant no. MNiSW DIR/WK/2016/07. M.C., B.W.S., K.R., M.M., V.M., S.S., F.J., M.S., L.N.D and M.C.B. acknowledge funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 694745). M.C. acknowledges support of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (project number DE220100819) funded by the Australian Government and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions, through project number CE170100013. K.R. acknowledges support from the Vici research programme ‘ARGO’ with project number 639.043.815, financed by the Dutch Research Council. J.v.d.E. is supported by a Lee Hysan Junior Research Fellowship awarded by St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. D.B. and P. Woudt acknowledge research support from the National Research Foundation.

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