14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers analyzing a supernova remnant in the Small Magellanic Cloud – one of the dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way – recently discovered that the giant cloud was inhabited by a very young pulsar.
A pulsar is a type of neutron star, whose position in the sky relative to Earth makes its radiation jets bright to our telescopes at regular intervals. From Earth, these objects look like cosmic lighthouses.
The fact that the supernova's progenitor star turned into a neutron star speaks volumes about its mass before the massive explosion tore out its atmosphere. Even after that happened, its core was large enough to collapse into a neutron star, the second-most dense object in the Universe after a black hole.
Using data collected by the NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton observatory, a group of experts managed to identify the pulsar even if it is concealed by massive amounts of gas and dust.
This discovery represents the first time that a pulsar was discovered in such a setup, in the SMC. Instances such as this one are not uncommon in the Universe, but this particular dwarf galaxy never revealed one before this study.
In order to gain the best possible view of the remnant, the team combined X-ray data (blue) with visible-light data (red and green), collected by the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, in Chile.
In this image, the young pulsar SXP 1062 can be seen as the brightest source of white light, to the right of the image. The red shell surrounding the blue light emissions is the supernova remnant housing it.
One of the most interesting things about this object is that it's one of the slowest-rotating X-ray pulsars in the SMC. Usually, new pulsars spin around their own axis several times per second, but this one takes about 18 minutes to complete a full spin.
To make matters even worse for experts, astronomers established the object's age at between 10,000 and 40,000 years old, which is extremely little in astronomical terms. How the pulsar was able to slow down so much over such a short time is still a mystery.
Astronomers are currently trying to piece together some models that could reveal what type of object, or what naturally-occurring phenomenon, is capable of slowing down the rotation rate of a new pulsar.