Daily Image
23-10-2018
It's good to take it slow
| Submitter: | Jason Hessels |
| Description: | In the ongoing LOTAAS survey, PhD student Chia Min Tan (University of Manchester) has discovered a radio pulsar that takes 23.5 seconds to make a single turn. Compared to other known radio pulsars, which spin on average once very 0.5 seconds, this is remarkably slow and came as a big surprise to the survey team. Interestingly, the super-slow pulsar still has a high magnetic field at its surface: roughly thirty trillion times higher than the Earth's magnetic field. This helps us understand why it is still producing visible radio pulsations, but the pulsar is ultimately an oddball and presents an important observational insight for constraining theory. It also remains a puzzle how this pulsar fits into the "zoo" of observed neutron stars. For example, is it an old descendant of the super-magnetised neutron stars known as "magnetars"? X-ray observations led by Chia Min Tan and Paolo Esposito aim to clarify this. The pulsar was also easily detected in the LoTSS imaging survey (work done by Tim Shimwell and Cees Bassa), and underlines the promise of using that survey to find more oddball pulsars that can lead to new insights. Finding such a slowly rotating pulsar is tricky business, but showcases LOFAR's strengths: the low frequencies, high sensitivity, and multiple beams of the LOTAAS survey make it possible to differentiate the pulsar signal from human-made interference. We are hoping that this is the tip of the iceberg for LOFAR, and that LOTAAS will reveal even slower-spinning pulsars. To that end, we've started reprocessing the archived data using algorithms better suited to finding such signals. This artist's conception, made by Danielle Futselaar, show's the regular pulses detected in LOFAR beam-formed data (in blue), as well as the LoTSS survey detection of the point source (in red). |
| Copyright: | ASTRON / Artwork by: Danielle Futselaar |
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