New View on Pulsars
Submit on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 10:27
Artist impression of a pulsar’s magnetosphere. Image credit: W.Becker/MPIClick to enlarge
Pulsars are the rapidly spinning corpses of massive stars. And although they were discovered nearly 40 years ago, they still hold many mysteries. One such mystery: why do pulsars have million-degree hotspots around their poles? New data from ESA’s XMM-Newton X-Ray observatory have cast doubt on the theory that charged particles are colliding with the pulsar’s surface at its poles. XMM-Newton failed to see the X-ray emissions in several old pulsars that should have been very bright if particles were continuously colliding.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 10:27 am and is filed under Astronomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
