(ORDO NEWS) — On June 7, 2022, astronomers discovered a unique space object that had previously been absent from astronomical catalogs.
After conducting a preliminary study of it, Japanese experts officially announced that they had managed to fix an accreting X-ray millisecond pulsar.
Of course, the study was preliminary, so it will still be necessary to study the object, but today scientists are fully confident that it will replenish the number of 18 similar stars. Very few pulsars of this type have been found in the Milky Way.
The pulsar emitted X-ray light, which was detected using the instrument of the Japan Space Agency. The device is called MAXI. It is on the ISS.
Hitoshi Negoro from Nihon University in Japan said that the pulsar is located at a distance of about 30 thousand light years from our planet. It was named MAXI J1816-195.
NASA specialists, using the already American NICER apparatus, also recorded the X-ray light emitted by the new object.
The device also demonstrated that the pulsar rotates around its axis at a tremendous speed – about 528.6 times per second.
A pulsar is a type of neutron star. It has a small size and high density. Pulsars appear only after a large star explodes in a supernova.
As a rule, the diameter of such space objects rarely exceeds 20 kilometers, their mass is quite large – about 2 times the mass of the Sun.
In order to be able to call a neutron star a pulsar, it must emit radiation at regular intervals, and also have its own magnetic field.
It is worth noting that you can find such pulsars that turn around their axis so quickly that they can release a huge number of pulses per second. They are called millisecond pulsars.
Some space objects of this type are located in a binary system and have their own companion star. They are located at a minimum distance and therefore the pulsar can take matter from another star.
This process is called accretion. When the “stolen” substance gets inside the neutron star, flashes of varying degrees of intensity occur. They are clearly visible in the X-ray range.
Due to the fact that scientists made the discovery quite recently, today they continue to study the space object.
New details about such a rare instance of a neutron star, which is located in the Milky Way, will soon be provided.
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