A Pulsar has Been Found Turning so Slowly Astronomers Didn't Even Think it was Possible: Once Every 76 Seconds universetoday storybywill
Neutron stars are the extremely dense remnants of massive stars that have undergone gravitational collapse and shed their outer layers in a supernova. These stars often have very fast spins, and their powerful magnetic fields cause them to emit tight beams of radiation that sweep across the sky . Astronomers are currently aware of about 3,000 pulsars in the Milky Way galaxy, and the timing of their pulses is used as a sort of “astronomical beacon” .
In all previous cases, magnetars have been observed to have rapid rotational periods. But in this case, the team observed what appeared to be an “ultra-long period magnetar,” a theoretical class of neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields.
“Amazingly we only detect radio emission from this source for 0.5% of its rotation period. This means that it is very fortuitous that the radio beam intersected with the Earth. It is therefore likely that there are many more of these very slowly spinning sources in the Galaxy which has important implications for how neutron stars are born and age.
“The majority of pulsar surveys do not search for periods this long and so we have no idea how many of these sources there might be. In this case the source was bright enough that we could detect the single pulses with the MeerTRAP instrument at MeerKAT.”“The sensitivity that MeerKAT provides, combined with the sophisticated searching that was possible withMeerTRAP and an ability to make simultaneous images of the sky, made this discovery possible,” added Dr.