(ORDO NEWS) — Using NASA‘s Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, Chinese astronomers studied a newly discovered millisecond pulsar called PSR J1835-3259B. As a result, they identified gamma radiation from this source.
Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars that emit streams of electromagnetic radiation. The most rapidly rotating pulsars, with rotation periods of less than 30 milliseconds, are known as millisecond pulsars.
Astronomers believe that such objects formed as part of binary systems, when the initially more massive component turned into a neutron star, and this neutron star then spun around its axis due to the accretion of matter from another star that is part of the system.
The pulsar PSR J1835-3259B is a newly discovered millisecond pulsar located in the globular cluster of stars NGC 6652.
It has a rotation period of approximately 1.83 milliseconds and moves in a nearly circular orbit with a period of 28.7 hours within the boundaries of the cluster. The distance from Earth to a pulsar is about 32,600 light years.
With star cluster NGC 6652 displaying noticeable gamma rays, a team led by Pengfei Zhang of Yunnan University in Kunming,
China, studied the pulsar PSR J1835-3259B in hopes of detecting gamma rays from it as well. For this purpose, scientists used data collected by the onboard Large Area Telescope (LAT) of the Fermi space observatory.
Based on these observational data collected over a period of about 14 years, Zhang’s team was able to detect gamma radiation from the pulsar PSR J1835-3259B.
The results showed that the profile of gamma radiation observed from this millisecond pulsar closely resembles the profile of radio emission from this object.
Astronomers believe that the observed gamma radiation in the star cluster NGC 6652 is mainly responsible for the pulsar PSR J1835-3259B. Scientists have not yet been able to detect another likely source of gamma rays in this cluster of stars, the article states.
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