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Recycling Pulsars – The Millisecond Matters…
An artist's impression of an accreting X-ray millisecond pulsar. The flowing material from the companion star forms a disk around the neutron star which is truncated at the edge of the pulsar magnetosphere. Credit: NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center / Dana Berry
It’s a millisecond pulsar… a rapidly rotating neutron star and it’s about to reach the end of its mass gathering phase. For ages the vampire of this binary system has been sucking matter from a donor star. It has been busy, spinning at incredibly high rotational speeds of about 1 to 10 milliseconds and shooting off X-rays. Now, something is about to happen. It is going to lose a whole lot of energy and age very quickly. (…)
Read the rest of Recycling Pulsars – The Millisecond Matters… (551 words)
© tammy for Universe Today, 2012. |
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Post tags: binary stars, Millisecond Pulsars, Neutron Stars, Pulsars, Radio Astronomy, Spinning Pulsar, Stellar Rotation, x-rays
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