Sinister Security: Pulsar

China's Enormous New Alien Hunting Radio Telescope Has Made Its Very First Discovery

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A little over a year since its completion, China’s 500-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST for short) has just made its first confirmed discovery. Astronomers used the giant dish to spot a pair of pulsars thousands of light years away, heralding big things for what is now the world’s largest single dish radio telescope.

The stars, called PSR J1859-01 and PSR J1931-01, were detected by the telescope back in August, but it took a few extra months until the Parkes telescope in Australia could confirm them as the real deal. Both objects are dense, rapidly spinning stars surrounded by strong magnetic fields. These fields channel electromagnetic radiation into a beam that describes a circle with every rotation, much like a cosmic lighthouse.

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Seen from Earth, the stars seem to pulse with every sweep, giving them their name pulsar. Their positions and timing make for useful landmarks in space, not to mention handy cosmic clocks for testing general relativity. The pair discovered by FAST – also dubbed FP1 and FP2 – don’t stand out in terms of size, speed, or distance.

“FP1 is a pulsar with a spin period of 1.83 second and an estimated distance of 16 thousand light-years, and FP2, is a pulsar with a spin period of 0.59 second and an estimated distance of 4,100 light years,” says deputy chief engineer of FAST, Li Di.

For a comparison, the fastest pulsar turns on its axis an insane 642 times per second. In February the European Space Agency found a pulsar that was a thousand times brighter than ever thought possible, 50 million light years away. But give it a chance – FAST exceeds the 305 metre wide Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico as the largest dish of its kind, so far more impressive discoveries are surely yet to come.

“The two new discovered pulsars symbolise the dawn of a new era of systematic discoveries by Chinese radio telescopes,” says Yan Jun, director of the National Astronomical Observatories of China.

The US$185 million facility was built to collect radio waves washing over the planet from the far reaches of deep space, allowing researchers to pick up faint traces of radiation from ancient clouds of hydrogen gas, distant black holes, pulsars, or … just maybe … alien wifi. The dish sits inside a giant sinkhole in Guizhou Province, southwest China, where limestone has dissolved away to leave a massive depression.

The stats are impressive; 4,450 panels give the dish a collection area of 196,000 square metres (about 2,109,700 square feet), more than doubling Arecibo’s coverage. A bigger dish can collect more radio waves, which means detecting fainter signals; just the thing we need to see deeper into space, and therefore further back in time.

This hollow amid the surrounding hills provides a natural shelter from more Earthly radio waves, giving FAST a quiet spot to stare at the heavens. Closer to home, the giant dish could also be used to track spacecraft travelling to Mars as part of China’s burgeoning space program. China has been making extraordinary leaps in space-based technology in recent years, such as facilitating the first quantum-encrypted satellite link-up just a few weeks ago.

Earlier this year the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation announced it would be conducting a record 30 launches into space this year, maintaining a trend in recent years that could see it meet its goal of landing technology on Mars by 2020. FAST is just one more example of the nation’s rapid progress in space technology. While it still has a few more tests to conduct to fine tune its processes, it won’t be long before the facility is available to astronomers all over the globe.

We can’t wait to see what else it discovers.

Astronomers Have Discovered an Object Rotating at Incredible 700 Times a Second

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An international team of researchers has detected an incredible astronomical object: a pulsar that spins over 42,000 times every minute. This is the second-fastest-spinning pulsar ever discovered. The findings, reported in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, describe PSR J0952–0607, the leftover core of a star that became a supernova. It's a type of neutron star so it has a significant mass, about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, in a tiny volume. It wouldn’t be much larger than Manhattan.

But unlike many neutron stars, PSR J0952–0607 is a pulsar. A beam of radiation is emitted by these objects and as they spin, they appear to pulsate, hence the name. This pulsar rotates 707 times each second.

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The discovery was possible by combining the data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope with the Netherlands-based Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope. It was detected at a frequency much lower than conventional radio searches, which might suggest that there’s a whole new population of ultra-fast pulsars waiting to be found.

“Roughly a third of the gamma-ray sources found by Fermi have not been detected at other wavelengths,” Elizabeth Ferrara, a member of the discovery team at NASA's Goddard Space Center, stated. “Many of these unassociated sources may be pulsars, but we often need follow-up from radio observatories to detect the pulses and prove it. There's a real synergy across the extreme ends of the electromagnetic spectrum in hunting for them.”

This pulsar also has another label. It’s a black widow pulsar, nicknamed because the stellar object is consuming a companion star. The team identified J0952’s companion, a star that has been eroded so dramatically that it only weighs about 20 times the mass of Jupiter.

The fastest-spinning pulsar rotates on itself about 43,000 times every minute, but even that incredible value is nowhere close to the theoretical limit scientists estimated. A pulsar could spin as fast as 72,000 times per minute before it would be ripped apart. So where are these extremely fast pulsars?

“There is growing evidence that the fastest-spinning pulsars tend to have the steepest spectra,” said co-author Ziggy Pleunis, from McGill University in Montreal. “Since LOFAR searches are more sensitive to these steep-spectrum radio pulsars, we may find that even faster pulsars do, in fact, exist and have been missed by surveys at higher frequencies.”

If the team is right, pulsar J0952 won’t stay in second place for long.

Astronomer Have Discovered ‘Surprise’ Pulsar, ‘Most Important Planet Ever’ At The Edge Of Our Solar System

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Just few days ago astronomers claimed to have to discover aPulsar, PSR J0540-6919, which lies outside the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud nearly 163,000 light-years away. Pulsars are neutron stars, remnants from supernova detonations. The swiftly spinning magnetic field of the tremendously dense star core emits rays of radio waves, visible light, X-rays and gamma rays. The important thing about J0540 was that it spins just under 20 times per second, according to data acquired by the Fermi probe. Another rare characteristic of the J0540 is its age: The pulsar is approximately 1,700 years old, whereas most of the other 2,500 known pulsars are calculated to be ranged in age between 10,000 and hundreds of millions of years.

Image Credit: NASA Goddard / YouTube

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News about the discovery of Pulsar J0540 came on the heels of the announcements of two planetary findings much closer to our solar system. By means of an array of 40-meter telescopes at the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory located in Chile, astronomers discovered a Venus-like planet only 39 light-years away. The planet circles Gliese 1132, an M-class red dwarf star located in the Vela constellation. The star is merely 21 percent the size of our sun, and produces only one-half a percent as much light, which allowed the astronomers to spot a planetary transit.

According to the observations, GJ 1132b is just 1.2 times the mass of Earth, and seems to be a rocky world with habitable atmosphere. Writing in the journal Nature, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have labelled it the “closest Earth-sized exoplanet yet discovered.”

Well this is not it yet; another astounding discovery this week came from a terrestrial telescope located high up on Hawaii’s dormant volcano Mauna Kea. A group of astronomers working at the Subaru telescope spotted an icy dwarf planet orbiting on the external edge of our solar system. An icy body 500-1000 km wide, the V774104 is 9.6 billion miles (15.4 billion kilometers) from the Sun. According to the astronomers this is one of the most important planets discovered so far.

Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, who declared the discovery at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, said "We can't explain these objects' orbits from what we know about the solar system. The findings may need astronomers to re-examine the current model of the solar system’s origins."

Sinister Security

China's Enormous New Alien Hunting Radio Telescope Has Made Its Very First Discovery

Astronomers Have Discovered an Object Rotating at Incredible 700 Times a Second

Astronomer Have Discovered ‘Surprise’ Pulsar, ‘Most Important Planet Ever’ At The Edge Of Our Solar System

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