A star's massive death is not quiet. It is literally explosive.
Their deaths, according to Science Alert, are extraordinarily dazzling events that brighten the universe, wherein a supernova explosion is triggered that unleashes the guts of a star.
However, the center of a dead star can survive, and it becomes a black hole or an extremely dense neutron star.
Pulsing Neutron Star
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory recently detected a pulsing neutron star, also known as a pulsar, which recorded an astounding 612 kilometers per second (rough estimate) or 1.4 million per hour!
This is one of the fastest pulsars that has ever been discovered. Science Alert noted that the record was formerly held by Sgr A*, a supermassive black hole found at the heart of the Milky Way with an insane speed of 24,000 kilometers per second (at its fastest point).
Xi Long of the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) said that their team could detect the speed of the pulsar using Chandra X-rays' "very sharp vision."
G292.0+1.8, a bright supernova leftover from 20,000 light-years away, was detected to determine the pulsar's speed.
"We only have a handful of supernova explosions that also have a reliable historical record tied to them," astrophysicist Daniel Patnaude of the CfA told Science Alert.
A fast pulsar had been discovered there in earlier studies. Long and his team sought to explore if tracing the object's path back to its center could give information about the supernova's history.
They examined the differences in the pulsar's location between photos obtained in 2006 and 2016 and Gaia data on its present location in the Milky Way.
These studies showed something intriguing: the dead star seemed to be moving 30% quicker than prior calculations indicated.
Read also: NASA Chandra X-Ray Telescope Snaps Galaxy Clusters Colliding in Space
Two Scenarios
The team also performed fresh, in-depth research on how the death star was blasted from the supernova's core because of the pulsar's altered velocity. They devised two scenarios, each involving the same process.
The first scenario explained that neutrinos were blasted asymmetrically from the supernova explosion. The second scenario claimed that the debris from the explosion was discharged asymmetrically.
Science Alert noted that since the neutrino energy has to be incredibly large, asymmetrical debris is the most plausible scenario.
According to CfA astronomer Paul Plucinsky, the pulsar is nearly 200 million times stronger than the Earth's velocity around the Sun. He attributes this to the asymmetric supernova explosion.
The Astrophysical Journal has accepted the team's findings, which were delivered at the 240th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The paper is currently accessible on arXiv.
Related Article: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Spots White Dwarf Star Ripping Up Planetary System
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Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla
