Astronomers Spot Unprecedented Glow Around Neutron Star...

[JohnnyRingo]

... and Whatever It Is, It’s Important

Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have glimpsed a neutron star unlike any seen before.

Neutron stars, which contain more mass than the Sun but have a radius of only a few miles, continue to be the subject of intense observation. Now, scientists have spotted one of these ultra-dense objects emitting infrared radiation far brighter than they’d expect, over a seemingly wide swath of space—larger than our Solar System. They have several ideas as to what they’re looking at, and any of these ideas, if verified, would be important discoveries.

“The emission is clearly above what the neutron star itself emits—it doesn’t come from the neutron star alone,” the study’s lead author Bettina Posselt, associate research professor at Penn State University, told Gizmodo. “This is very new.”

The researchers observed a rotating neutron star, a pulsar called RX J0806.4-4123, located 815 light-years away. The pulsar is one of the “magnificent seven,” the relatively slowly pulsing objects—this one pulses every 11.37 seconds—that emit bright x-rays but not radio waves, all within 3,300 light-years of Earth. These pulsars’ bright x-rays seem to require some other energy source—perhaps large magnetic fields or dusty disks supplying matter that falls into them.

These new observations of RX J0806.4-4123 revealed infrared radiation far brighter than the scientists expected. This implied to the researchers that they were looking at not just the neutron star, but the wider feature surrounding it, according to the paper published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Continued here:
https://gizmodo.com/astronomers-spot-unprecedented-glow-around-neutron-star-1829138029

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[Nitram]

1. Could cosmic ray emissions be exciting atoms in a dust cloud to produce the glow?