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Spin! Crab Pulsar Speed Jumps Linked To Billions Of Tiny Vortices
Artist’s conception of a gamma-ray pulsar. Gamma rays are shown in purple, and radio radiation in green. Credit: NASA/Fermi/Cruz de Wilde
Pulsars — those supernova leftovers that are incredibly dense and spin very fast — may change their speed due to activity of billions of vortices in the fluid beneath their surface, a new study says.
The work is based on a combination of research and modelling and looks at the Crab Nebula pulsar, which has periodic slowdowns in its rotation of at least 0.055 nanoseconds. Occasionally, the Crab and other pulsars see their spins speed up in an event called a “glitch”. Luckily for astronomers, there is a wealth of data on Crab because the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the United Kingdom looked at it almost daily for the last 29 years.
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Read the rest of Spin! Crab Pulsar Speed Jumps Linked To Billions Of Tiny Vortices (131 words)
© Elizabeth Howell for Universe Today, 2014. |
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Post tags: crab nebula, crab nebula pulsar, jodrell bank observatory, Neutron Star, pulsar
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Source: http://www.universetoday.com/111204/spin-crab-pulsar-speed-jumps-linked-to-billions-of-tiny-vortices/
