Atlantis Online
March 28, 2024, 02:27:26 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Ruins of 7,000-year-old city found in Egypt oasis
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080129/wl_mideast_afp/egyptarchaeology
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

Scientistsd Witness A Cosmic Recycling First: Study

Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: Scientistsd Witness A Cosmic Recycling First: Study  (Read 361 times)
0 Members and 71 Guests are viewing this topic.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« on: May 22, 2009, 01:03:36 pm »









                                  Scientists witness a cosmic recycling first: study




   

Thu May 21, 2009
WASHINGTON
(AFP)

– Scientists have witnessed a first in something like star recycling: a slow-spinning pulsar star fading fast and being transformed into a superfast millisecond pulsar with a super-long life.

A team of Canadian, British, Dutch, Australian and US scientists used the Robert C. Byrd radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia, to observe nearly a third of the celestial stunner.

Their results were published online by Science on Thursday.

"This survey has found many new pulsars, but this one is truly special -- it is a very freshly 'recycled' pulsar that is emerging straight from the recycling plant," said astrophysics doctoral candidate Anne Archibald.

Pulsars are fast-spinning, highly magnetized neutron stars -- remnants left after massive stars explode as supernovae. But millisecond pulsars rotate hundreds of times in a second.

"Imagine a ping-pong ball in the bathtub, and then you take the plug out of the drain," said Archibald.

"All the water swirling around the ping-pong ball suddenly makes it spin a lot faster than when it was just bobbing on the surface."

"We know normal pulsars typically pulsate in the radio spectrum for one million to ten million years, but eventually they slow down enough to die out," explained professor Victoria Kaspi of Canada's McGill Pulsar Group.

"But a few of these old pulsars get 'recycled' into millisecond pulsars. They end up spinning extremely fast, and then they can pulsate forever," Kaspi said, wondering: "How does nature manage to be so green?"

"For the first time, we have caught a glimpse at an actual cosmic recycling factory in action," said Ingrid Stairs of University of British Columbia, who has been visiting the Australia Telescope National Facility and Swinburne University of Technology.

"This system gives us an unparalleled cosmic laboratory for studying how millisecond pulsars evolve and get reborn," she said.
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.


Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy