An international team of astronomers including Dr. Adam Deller (ASTRON) has made a measurement of a distant neutron star that is one million times more precise than the previous world’s best.
Published by the editorial team, 16 May 2014
The researchers were able to use the interstellar medium, the ‘empty’ space between stars and galaxies that is made up of sparsely spread charged particles, as a giant lens to magnify and look closely at the radio wave emission from a small rotating neutron star.
This technique yielded the highest resolution measurement ever achieved, equivalent to being able to detect a virus (less than a thousandth of a mm in size) on the surface of the Moon!
‘Compared to other objects in space, neutron stars are tiny, only tens of kilometres in diameter, so we need extremely high resolution to observe them and understand their physics,’ Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Perth said.
Some neutron stars, known as pulsars, emit regular pulses of radio waves as they rotate in space. The researchers found they could use the distortions of these pulse signals as they passed through the turbulent interstellar medium to reconstruct a close in view of the pulsar from thousands of individual sub-images of the pulsar.
‘The best we could previously do was pointing a large number of radio telescopes across the world at the same pulsar, using the distance between the telescopes on Earth to get good resolution,’ Dr Macquart said.
Dr. Adam Deller (ASTRON): ‘We’d already looked at this dataset once before, in a paper published in 2010, where we showed that the material forming our ‘Galactic lens’ was distributed in a long, skinny blob. But what was special about this re-analysis was that rather than adding all of the data together, we compared the middle of the pulse to the beginning and end of the pulse, and we were able to look for tiny changes in the position of the source of the emission.’
The previous record using combined views from many telescopes was an angular resolution of 50 microarcseconds, but the team, led by Professor Ue-Li Pen of the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics and a CAASTRO Partner Investigator, has now proven their ‘interstellar lens’ can get down to 50 picoarcseconds, or a million times more detail, resolving areas of less than 5km in the emission region.
‘Our new method can take this technology to the next level and finally get to the bottom of some hotly debated theories about pulsar emission,’ Professor Pen said.
Testing their technique on pulsar B0834+06, the researchers found the neutron star’s emission region was much smaller than previously assumed and possibly much closer to the star’s surface – which might be the most crucial element in understanding the origin of the radio wave emission.
‘What’s more, this new technique also opens up the possibilities for precise distance measurements to pulsars that orbit a companion star and ‘image’ their extremely small orbits – which is ultimately a new and highly sensitive test of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity,’ Professor Pen said.
‘We’re moving ahead with plans to observe a number of different pulsars, and it will be really exciting to see if we can explain the variation – if any – that we see between them,’ said Deller.
The Australian Research Council has awarded Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart and Prof Ue-Li Pen $344,000 in research funding to continue to develop their technique and measure other pulsars.
Further Information
ASTRON is the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Its main mission is to make discoveries in radio astronomy happen, via the development of new and innovative technologies, the operation of world-class radio astronomy facilities, and the pursuit of fundamental astronomical research. Engineers and astronomers at ASTRON have an outstanding international reputation for novel technology development, and fundamental research in galactic and extra-galactic astronomy.
ICRAR is a joint venture between Curtin University and The University of Western Australia that receives funding from the State Government of Western Australia.
CAASTRO is a collaboration between Curtin University, The University of Western Australia, the University of Sydney, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Queensland. It is funded under the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence program and receives additional funding from the seven participating universities and the NSW State Government Science Leveraging Fund.
The original press release from CAASTRO-ICRAR can be found on: http://goo.gl/ZNLhGe.
Original publication
Pen, Macquart, Deller, Brisken “50 picoarcsec astrometry of pulsar emission.” in MNRAS Letters (May 2014). Also available on arXiv.
Multimedia
Caption to the images: The densely packed matter of a pulsar spins at incredible speeds, and emits radio waves that can be observed from Earth, but how neutron stars emit these waves is still a mystery. Both Images Credit: Swinburne Astronomy Productions/CAASTRO.
Animation showing radio wave emission from a pulsar:
