WE MIGHT have found a novel way to spot pulsars, the rapidly spinning corpses of massive stars – and the process may have uncovered a new species of these objects.
Pulsars emit powerful beams of radio waves that sweep across space like a lighthouse, but radio telescopes only notice these if Earth is in their path. Thus there could be thousands of invisible pulsars in our galaxy waiting to be discovered.
Now Tim Linden at Ohio State University in Columbus has thought up a way to find them. His idea was to use the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov observatory – made up of 300 water tanks on a Mexican mountaintop – to detect gamma radiation produced when charged particles emitted by pulsars interact with the gas between stars.
To test the technique, Linden and his colleagues observed the sky around two known pulsars and found that the gamma emissions matched up (arxiv.org/abs/1703.09704).
These emissions also seemed to reveal the existence of a new type of pulsar whose wind of charged particles streams out further than expected, says Linden.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Water telescope hunts new pulsars”