(ORDO NEWS) — An important breakthrough in understanding the collision between dead stars and the expansion of the universe was made by an international team of scientists led by researchers from the University of East Anglia, UK.
In their work, astronomers discovered an unusual pulsar – a rotating neutron star with a powerful magnetic field, which regularly emits focused pulses of radio emission from the magnetic poles.
This newly discovered pulsar (known as PSR J1913 + 1102) is part of a binary system that includes another neutron star as a second component.
Neutron stars are the dead remnants of massive stars that exploded like supernovae. They consist of the densest matter known to science – so dense that a ball of such a substance the size of a large city weighs several hundred thousand times more than the Earth.
After about half a billion years, these two neutron stars will collide, releasing huge amounts of energy in the form of gravitational waves and light.
“Since one neutron star is much more massive than another, its gravitational influence will lead to distortion of the shape of a less massive neutron star. As a result, a large amount of hot material will be ejected, and the brightness of the flare that accompanies this fusion will be significantly higher compared to the case of fusion of neutron stars of approximately equal mass, ”said Robert Ferdman, the main author of the new study. According to Ferdman, the famous gravitational wave source discovered in 2017 under the name GW170817 may be a system similar in structure to the PSR J1913 + 1102 system. In addition, systems like PSR J1913 + 1102 can enable independent determination of the Hubble constant, which is a measure of the speed of the “recession” of galaxies of the Universe, the authors explained.
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