(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of astronomers has announced the discovery of a new millisecond pulsar in the globular cluster NGC 6652.
The newly discovered pulsar has been designated PSR J1835-3259B. The study, which details the find and reveals the fundamental parameters of this object, was published May 30 on the arXiv preprint server.
Pulsars are highly magnetized, spinning neutron stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation. The most rapidly rotating pulsars with a rotation period of less than 30 milliseconds are known as millisecond pulsars.
Astronomers suggest that they are formed in binary systems when an initially more massive object turns into a neutron star, which then spins up due to the accretion of matter from a second star.
A team of astronomers led by Tashi Gautam from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, has discovered another millisecond pulsar as part of their study of data from the Giant Meter Radio Telescope (uGMRT).
During radio observations of eight galaxy clusters at 400 MHz and 650 MHz using the new uGMRT GMRT Wideband Backend (GWB) system, they found that NGC 6652 hosts a rapidly rotating pulsar.
“In this article, we present the results of a study of pulsars that we conducted using the new broadband uGMRT receivers to search for pulsars in the spectra at frequencies of 400 MHz and 650 MHz.
We observed eight galaxy clusters and searched for isolated and binary pulsar systems in each of them using segmented and full-size search methods.We have discovered a new binary object, which we have named MSP J1835-3259B, in the galaxy NGC 6652,” the researchers explained.
PSR J1835-3259B is the first pulsar detected by uGMRT. Its rotation period is about 1.83 milliseconds, its orbital period is almost 1.2 days, and its dispersion is about 63.5 pc/cm3.
The results show that PSR J1835-3259B is a binary system with a wide orbit but relatively small eccentricity. According to astronomers, the characteristic age of this binary system is at least 430 million years, and the strength of its surface magnetic field does not exceed 350 million Gauss.
The study showed that the mass of the companion object in PSR J1835-3259B is most likely 0.21 solar masses, and the mass of the pulsar at 1.4 solar masses. The researchers suggest that the companion is a helium white dwarf, as the results are consistent with data from similar systems of millisecond pulsars.
In addition to finding PSR J1835-3259B, the study also estimated the flux density and spectral signatures of all pulsars in the eight galaxy clusters surveyed by Gautam’s team.
It turned out that PSR J1835-3259B is the brightest pulsar among all the others in these clusters. In addition, astronomers have detected three radio sources unrelated to any known pulsar in NGC 6652. Further observations are needed to elucidate their nature.
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