Astronomers using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a low-frequency radio telescope in Australia, have discovered a new long-period, low-luminosity pulsar.
An artist’s impression of one of 256 tiles of the Murchison Widefield Array observing a pulsar. Image credit: Dilpreet Kaur / ICRAR / Curtin University.
The newly-discovered pulsar is located more than 3,000 light-years away from Earth.
Named PSR J0036-1033, the pulsar is faint, and has a period of 0.9 seconds.
“That’s incredibly fast compared to regular stars and planets, but in the world of pulsars, it’s pretty normal,” said Dr. Ramesh Bhat, an astronomer at the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).
“Pulsars spin rapidly and emit electromagnetic radiation from their magnetic poles,” added Nick Swainston, a Ph.D. student at ICRAR.
“Every time that emission sweeps across our line of sight, we see a pulse – that’s why we call them pulsars. You can imagine it like a giant cosmic lighthouse.”
The astronomers made the discovery while processing MWA data collected as part of an ongoing pulsar survey.
They then performed follow-up observations with the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) and the Parkes 64-m telescopes.
“The finding was made using about 1% of the large volume of data collected for the pulsar survey,” Dr. Bhat said.
“We’ve only scratched the surface. When we do this project at full-scale, we should find hundreds of pulsars in the coming years.”
“The discovery hints at a large population of pulsars awaiting discovery in the southern hemisphere,” said Professor Steven Tingay, director of MWA and an astronomer at ICRAR.
“This finding is really exciting because the data processing is incredibly challenging, and the results show the potential for us to discover many more pulsars with MWA.”
The discovery is reported in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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N.A. Swainston et al. 2021. Discovery of a Steep-spectrum Low-luminosity Pulsar with the Murchison Widefield Array. ApJL 911, L26; doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/abec7b
