Observing a Strange Pulsar in X-ray and Radio
Pulsars are weird in the first place, but PSR J1023+0038 is just a bit weirder.
Pulsars are weird in the first place, but PSR J1023+0038 is just a bit weirder.
Measuring stellar ages is difficult, so sometimes we need to resort to using indirect estimates. In today’s paper, we will see how to calibrate a cosmic clock for cool stars and, as a bonus, discover that the activity of these stars may decline faster than we previously thought.
Fomalhaut (a.k.a. the Eye of Sauron) has a dusty disk around it and an intriguing speck of light near the edge of the disk. But we don’t exactly know the nature of this object: Could it be… a neutron star?
X-ray studies of galaxy clusters tell us how the extremely hot gas is distributed within these gigantic structures. Looking at these clusters across different redshifts, what does one find?
Sgr A* – the supermassive black hole sitting in the center of the Milky Way – is often referred to as a ‘starved’ black hole, meaning that it swallows very little of the nearby cosmic gas and dust. The authors of this paper observed Sgr A* with the Chandra X-ray telescope for 3 mega seconds, throughout which only 1% of the gas available to Sgr A* actually accreted onto the black hole. It swallows cold gas, while rejecting hot gas – ejecting the matter back into space.
The authors discuss the possibility that the strangely-shaped supernova remnant W49B was created by a core-collapse supernova that formed strong bipolar jets instead of a spherical shockwave.