A dead star just hit our planet Earth with a powerful energy blast that was so massive that scientists are baffled and are not able to explain the incident clearly.
The blast was made up of a burst of gamma rays that originated from a dead star known as a pulsar and is the highest energy of its kind that humans have ever seen. It had the energy equivalent to roughly ten trillion times that of visible light, or 20 tera-electronvolts.
Dead Star's Powerful Energy Blast
The energy blast is so mysterious that scientists are incapable of explaining exactly what kind of a scenario could have led to a pulsar emitting such intense energy. The researchers behind the breakthrough also said that it "requires a rethinking of how these natural accelerators work."
Now, scientists are also hoping that they will be able to find more powerful energy blasts from pulsars, with a view to better understand how they are formed. Pulsars are created whenever a star dies and explodes in a supernova to leave behind a tiny, dead star. These are roughly 20 kilometers across spin at an extremely fast pace and have a powerful magnetic field, as per Newsbreak.
In a statement, a scientist at the High Energy Stereoscopic System observatory in Namibia, Emma de Ona Wilhelmi, said that these dead stars are almost entirely made up of neutrons and have extremely high density. A small teaspoon full of these cosmic objects have a mass of five billion tons, which is roughly equal to 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
When pulsars spin, they hurl beams of electromagnetic radiation, similar to how a lighthouse shines a light at night. This means that someone in one spot, such as our planet, will see the radiation pulses flash in a regular rhythm.
This radiation is believed to be the result of fast electrons that are produced and thrown out by the dead star's magnetosphere. This is made up of plasma and electromagnetic fields that surround the star and spin with it.
When experts previously searched the radiation for different energy bands within the electromagnetic spectrum, with the Vela pulsar that was examined in the new study, they discovered that it was the brightest ever seen in the radio band and the brightest persistent source in the giga-electronvolts, according to Yahoo Life.
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Mysterious Creation of Radiation
A co-author of the recent study, Christo Venter from the North-West University in South Africa, said that the energy they observed was roughly 200 times more powerful than all radiation ever detected before from the object.
Arache Dhannati-Atai from the Astroparticle & Cosmology (APC) laboratory in France said that the result of the new study challenges humans' previous knowledge of pulsars and requires a rethinking of how these natural accelerators work.
She noted that the traditional scheme according to which particles are accelerated along magnetic field lines within or just slightly outside the magnetosphere is no longer a sufficient explanation for the new observations.
Djannati-Atai added that this could be the acceleration of particles through the so-called magnetic reconnection process beyond the light cylinder. However, she acknowledges that even the explanation faces difficulties in explaining how such extreme radiation is produced by the pulsar, said the Independent.
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