“But the signal that we observe with our telescopes suggests a much more complex structure behind this emission – probably coming from several emission regions, not just one.” “The classical pulsar model pictures the emission that is shooting out from the magnetic poles of the pulsar as a light cone,” Mr McSweeney said. Thousands of pulsars have been seen since their first discovery in the late 1960s, but questions still remain as to why these stars emit radio beams in the first place, and what type of emission model best describes the radio waves, or ‘light’, that we see. “They are nicknamed ‘lighthouses in space’ because they appear to ‘pulse’ once per rotation period, and their sweeping light signal can be seen through telescopes at exceptionally regular intervals.” “These pulsars weigh about half a million times the mass of the Earth but are only 20km across,” Mr McSweeney said. New research from Curtin University, obtained using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope located in the Western Australian outback, suggests the answer could lie in a ‘drifting carousel’ found in a special class of pulsars.Ĭurtin PhD student Sam McSweeney, who led the research as part of his PhD project with the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), described pulsars as extremely dense neutron stars that emit beams of radio waves. What sounds like a stomach-turning ride at an amusement park might hold the key to unravelling the mysterious mechanism that causes beams of radio waves to shoot out from pulsars − super-magnetic rotating stars in our Galaxy.
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