: You can buy Universe Sandbox 2 here : Or get a shirt Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about some of the unusual recent discoveries in regards to pulsars and the new chimera pulsar that was found. You can buy Universe Sandbox 2 game here: Read: An Infant Pulsar Defies Categorization Support this channel on Patreon to help me make this a full time job: Space Engine is available for free here: Enjoy and please subscribe. Twitter: Facebook: Twitch: The hardware used to record these videos: CPU: Video Card: Motherboard: RAM: PSU: Case: Microphone: Mixer: Recording and Editing: -----
Two papers have recently been published that make a compelling argument for the artificial origin of pulsars. The researchers who found the first pulsar in 1967 thought that they were alien beacons. Here's why they might have been right!! #nasa #space #alien Support my channel! EARLY VIDEO RELEASES AND EXCLUSIVE CONTENT PLUS 15% OFF MERCH! https://www.patreon.com/AngryAstronaut"> If you already pre-ordered your Angry Astronaut sunglasses, please email me at jwrighttpsc@gmail.com and we will send you a form to fill in your shipping info and send you an invoice! WE STILL HAVE 9 PAIRS LEFT out of this 250 pair limited edition!!! If you want to reserve a pair of ANGRY SUNGLASSES, please send $20 US, Australian or Canadian to: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/AngryAstro"> The FINAL price is $40 US plus shipping Two cases for artificial pulsars! Evidence that Radio Pulsars may be Artificial Beacons of ETI Origin Pulsar positioning system: a quest for evidence of extraterrestrial engineering
Four-panel graphic showing the two pulsars, Geminga (upper left) and B0355+54 (upper right), observed by Chandra. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CXC/PSU/B.Posselt et al/N.Klingler et al/Nahks TrEhnl
Image of the pulsar surrounded by its bow shock. White rays indicate particles of matter and antimatter being spewed from the star. Its companion star is too close to the pulsar to be visible at this scale. Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
Published on May 14, 2013 Pulsars are thought to emit relatively narrow radio beams, shown as green in this animation. If these beams don't sweep toward Earth, astronomers cannot detect the radio signals. Pulsar gamma-ray emission (magenta) is thought to form a broader fan of radiation that can be detected even when the radio beam is unfavorably oriented. (No audio.) Credit: NASA/Fermi/Cruz deWilde Category Science & Technology License Standard YouTube License
An artist’s impression of an accreting X-ray millisecond pulsar. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Dana Berry
An all-sky view from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, showing the position of Geminga in the Milky Way. Credit : NASA/DOE/International LAT Team.
An artist's impression of a pulsar syphoning material away from a companion star, leading to the formation of a millisecond pulsar.
The slowest spinning X-ray pulsar in a globular star cluster has been discovered in the Andromeda galaxy. Credit: A. Zolotov
A diagram of the ESA XMM-Newton X-Ray Telescope. Delivered to orbit by a Ariane 5 launch vehicle in 1999. Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton
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Published on Sep 25, 2013 This animation illustrates how an old pulsar in a binary system can be reactivated -- and sped up to a millisecond spin -- by accreting gas from its companion star. A pulsar is a rapidly rotating neutron star that emits pulses of radiation (such as X-rays and radio waves) at regular intervals. A millisecond pulsar is one with a rotational period between 1 and 10 milliseconds, or from 60,000 to 6,000 revolutions per minute. Pulsars form in supernova explosions, but even newborn pulsars don't spin at millisecond speeds, and they gradually slow down with age. If, however, a pulsar is a member of a binary system with a normal star, gas transferred from the companion can spin up an old, slow pulsar to the millisecond range. For more information, go to This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: Category Science & Technology License Standard YouTube License
Artist's illustration of a rotating neutron star, the remnants of a super nova explosion. Credit: NASA, Caltech-JPL
An all-sky view in gamma ray light made with the Fermi gamma ray space telescope. Credit: NASA/DOE/International LAT Team
Artist’s impression of a pulsar siphoning material from a companion star. Credit: NASA
This animation shows a black widow pulsar like J0952 together with its small stellar companion, as seen from within their orbital plane. Powerful radiation and the pulsar's "wind" — an outflow of high-energy particles — strongly heat the facing side of the companion, evaporating it over time. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Cruz deWilde This video is public domain and may be downloaded at: Related story: Category Science & Technology License Standard YouTube License
Black widow spiders and their Australian cousins, known as redbacks, are notorious for an unsettling tendency to kill and devour their male partners. Astronomers have noted similar behavior among two rare breeds of binary system that contain rapidly spinning neutron stars, also known as pulsars. The essential features of black widow and redback binaries are that they place a normal but very low-mass star in close proximity to a millisecond pulsar, which has disastrous consequences for the star. Black widow systems contain stars that are both physically smaller and of much lower mass than those found in redbacks. So far, astronomers have found at least 18 black widows and nine redbacks within the Milky Way, and additional members of each class have been discovered within the dense globular star clusters that orbit our galaxy. One black widow system, named PSR J1311-3430 and discovered in 2012, sets the record for the tightest orbit of its class and contains one of the heaviest neutron stars known. The pulsar's featherweight companion, which is only a dozen or so times the mass of Jupiter and just 60 percent of its size, completes an orbit every 93 minutes -- less time than it takes to watch most movies. The side of the star facing the pulsar is heated to more than 21,000 degrees Fahrenheit (nearly 12,000 C), or more than twice as hot as the sun's surface. Recent studies allow a range of values extending down to 2 solar masses for the pulsar, making it one of the most massive neutron stars known. Watch the video to learn more about this system and its discovery from some of the scientists involved. :This video is public domain and can be downloaded at Like our videos? Subscribe to NASA's Goddard Shorts HD podcast: Or find NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Facebook: Or find us on Twitter: Category Science & Technology License Standard YouTube License
Artist’s impression of the pulsar PSR B1957+20 (seen in the background) through the cloud of gas enveloping its brown dwarf star companion. Credit: Dr. Mark A. Garlick; Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto
When stars exhaust their supply of fuel, they collapse under their own weight and explode, blowing off their outer layers in an event known as a “supernova”. In some cases, these events leave behind neutron stars, the smallest and densest of stellar objects (with the exception of certain theoretical stars) that sometimes spin rapidly. Pulsars, a class of neutron star, can spin up to several hundred times per second.
A pulsar with its magnetic field lines illustrated. The beams emitting from the poles are what washes over our detectors as the dead star spins. Credit: NASA/Fermi/Cruz de Wilde
Whole sky image showing 22 months of X-ray data recorded by NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER). Credits: NASA/NICER
The NICER payload, shown here on the outside of the International Space Station. Credit: NASA
Scientists have reached a new frontier in our understanding of pulsars, the dense, whirling remains of exploded stars, thanks to observations from NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER). Data from this X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station has produced the first precise and dependable measurements of both a pulsar’s size and its mass. The pulsar in question, J0030+0451 (J0030 for short), is a solitary pulsar that lies 1,100 light-years away in the constellation Pisces. While measuring the pulsar's heft and proportions, NICER revealed that the shapes and locations of million-degree hot spots on the pulsar’s surface are much stranger than generally thought. Using NICER observations from July 2017 to December 2018, two groups of scientists mapped J0030’s hot spots using independent methods and converged on nearly identical results for its mass and size. One team, led by researchers at the University of Amsterdam, determined the pulsar is around 1.3 times the Sun’s mass, 15.8 miles (25.4 kilometers) across and has two hot spots — one small and circular, the other long and crescent-shaped. A second team found J0030 is about 1.4 times the Sun’s mass, about 16.2 miles (26 kilometers) wide and has two or three oval-shaped hot spots. All spots in all models are in the pulsar’s southern hemisphere — unlike textbook images where the spots lie on opposite sides other at each magnetic poles. : Read more Music: "Uncertain Ahead" and "Flowing Cityscape" (underscore). Both from Universal Production Music Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scott Wiessinger (USRA): Producer Jeanette Kazmierczak (University of Maryland College Park): Science Writer Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park): Science Writer Michael Lentz (USRA): Animator Barb Mattson (University of Maryland College Park): Narrator Zaven Arzoumanian (NASA/GSFC): Scientist This video is public domain and along with other supporting visualizations can be downloaded from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio at: If you liked this video, subscribe to the NASA Goddard YouTube channel: Follow NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center · Instagram · Twitter Nasa Goddard · Twitter Nasa Goddard Pics · Facebook: · Flickr
stronomers have been watching a nearby pulsar with a strange halo around it. That pulsar might answer a question that’s puzzled astronomers for some time. The pulsar is named Geminga, and it’s one of the nearest pulsars to Earth, about 800 light years away in the constellation Gemini. Not only is it close to Earth, but Geminga is also very bright in gamma rays.
Geminga’s halo with The Big Dipper shown for scale. Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
his model shows Geminga’s gamma halo over time. Two effects change its shape. The first is the pulsar’s motion through space, the second is the energy level. At lower energy levels, the gamma ray halo is larger, while at higher energy levels, the halo is smaller. That’s because lower energy particles travel farther through space and away from the pulsar before they interact with starlight and get boosted to gamma-ray energy levels. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/M. Di Mauro
But the team using HAWC to observe Geminga and its halo came to a conclusion: those high-energy positrons would only rarely reach Earth, based on the size of the halo. So there had to be another explanation for the abundance of positrons near Earth.
An artist’s illustration of a pulsar, with beams of radio waves coming from its magnetic poles. Image Credit: NASA/S. Pineault, DRAO
Artist rendition of an accreting binary X-Ray pulsar ripping material off of its stellar companion – NASA
In this video I'll show you sounds from 7 Neutron Stars and these sounds are not fake they're real sounds but the different is the frequency isn't audible by humans and it's very far from the range which human ears can detect but they(NASA, Chandra X-ray Observatory etc.) shifted the frequency to make it audible and these are the radio waves waves detected and there's nothing to do with any medium. EM Waves doesn't require a medium to travel and they rather radiate/ Please do not make funny comments. LOL. Thanks for Watching Wish everyone will have a happy new year(2017) !! Today is 2016-12-31(Last day of 2016) License Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed) Source videos View attributions
Composite image of the maelstrom at the heart of the Crab Nebula powered by a neutron star – Chandra X-Ray Observatory
A movie from the Chandra website regarding the Crab Nebula (diameter of 11 ly, 6,500 ly from Earth). Source- images- 'This movie shows dynamic rings, wisps and jets of matter and antimatter around the pulsar in the Crab Nebula as observed in X-ray light by Chandra (left, blue) and optical light by Hubble (right, red). The movie was made from 7 still images of Chandra and Hubble observations taken between November 2000 and April 2001. To produce a movie of reasonable length the sequence was looped several times, as in looped weather satellite images. The inner ring is about one light year across.'
Plasma in the Sun following its own magnetic field lines – Solar Dynamics Observatory
Optical Light Spectrum of star “HD224355” The faint gaps or lines in the spectrum represent elements in the star that absorbed some of the star’s light which tells us about the star’s composition – Trottier Observatory
When pulsars were first discovered in 1967, their rhythmic radio-wave pulsations were a mystery. Some thought their radio beams must be of extraterrestrial origin. We’ve learned a lot since then. We know that pulsars are magnetized, rotating neutrons stars. We know that they rotate very rapidly, with their magnetic poles sending sweeping beams of radio waves out into space. And if they’re aimed the right way, we can “see” them as pulses of radio waves, even though the radio waves are steady. They’re kind of like lighthouses.
Schematic view of a pulsar. The sphere in the middle represents the neutron star, the curves indicate the magnetic field lines, the protruding cones represent the emission beams and the green line represents the axis on which the star rotates. Since the field lines are misaligned with the rotation axis, we see a pulsar as a rapidly flashing source of radio emission, if the magnetic poles are oriented twards Earth. Image Credit: By User:Mysid, User:Jm smits – Made by Mysid in Inkscape, based on en: Image:Pulsar schematic.jpg by Roy Smits., CC BY-SA 3.0,
The blue dot in this image marks the spot of an energetic pulsar — the magnetic, spinning core of star that blew up in a supernova explosion. NASA’s NuSTAR discovered the pulsar by identifying its telltale pulse. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SAO
Like pulsars, lightning can produce gamma rays and antimatter, too. Japanese scientists discovered this process in 2017. Image Credit: Kyoto University/Teruaki Enoto
A composite image of the Crab Nebula and Crab Pulsar (red dot in middle) showing the X-ray (blue), and optical (red) images superimposed. This new work can’t explain some of the emissions coming from the Crab Pulsar. Image Credit: By Optical: NASA/HST/ASU/J. Hester et al. X-Ray: NASA/CXC/ASU/J. Hester et al. – Public Domain,
An illustration of fast radio bursts in the night sky above CHIMES, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment. Credit: James Josephides/Mike Dalley
Astronomers discovered the first exoplanets in 1992. They found a pair of them orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12 about 2300 light-years from the Sun. Two years later they discovered the third planet in the system.
A pulsar is a neutron star that emits beams of radiation that sweep through Earth's line of sight. Like a black hole, it is an endpoint to stellar evolution. The "pulses" of high-energy radiation we see from a pulsar are due to a misalignment of the neutron star's rotation axis and its magnetic axis. Pulsars seem to pulse from our perspective because the rotation of the neutron star causes the beam of radiation generated within the magnetic field to sweep in and out of our line of sight with a regular period, somewhat like the beam of light from a lighthouse. The stream of light is, in reality, continuous, but to a distant observer, it seems to wink on and off at regular intervals. Pulsars are the original gamma-ray astronomy point sources. A few years after the discovery of pulsars by radio astronomers, the Crab and Vela pulsars were detected at gamma-ray energies. Pulsars accelerate particles to tremendous energies in their magnetospheres. These particles are ultimately responsible for the gamma-ray emission seen from pulsars. In this video, gamma rays are shown in magenta. Data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope indicate that most of the gamma rays emitted by a pulsar arise from far above the pulsar's surface. This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: Or find NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Facebook: Or find us on Twitter:
This illustration shows a pulsar with its magnetic field lines shown in blue. The beams emitting from the poles are what washes over our detectors as the dead star spins. Image Credit: NASA
This is an illustration of the binary pulsar J0737-3039. Most binary pulsars are pulsars paired with a planet or a neutron star, but J0737-3039 is a pair of pulsars. Image Credit: By Michael Kramer (Jodrell Bank Observatory, University of Manchester), Attribution, (Wkipedia)
Artist’s impression of the planets orbiting PSR B1257+12. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC)
Astronomy is progressing rapidly these days, thanks in part to how advances in one area can contribute to progress in another. For instance, improved optics, instruments, and data processing methods have allowed astronomers to push the boundaries of optical and infrared to gravitational wave (GW) astronomy. Radio astronomy is also advancing considerably thanks to arrays like the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, which will join with observatories in Australia in the near future to create the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).
This question comes from William. He writes "Hi Fraser, I was wondering if you could do a video on pulsars like you did on quasars." You got it. Stars are held in perfect balance between the pressure of gravity pulling them inward, and the outward force of radiation. Once stars runs out of fuel, they collapses in on themselves - it's the amount of mass decides what happens next. The most massive stars detonate as supernovae, and can explode or collapse into black holes. If they're less massive, like our Sun, they blast away their outer layers and then slowly cool down as white dwarfs. But for stars between 1.4 and 3.2 times the mass of the Sun, they may still become supernovae, but they just don't have enough mass to make a black hole. These medium mass objects end their lives as neutron stars, and some of these can become pulsars or magnetars. Gravity overwhelms the atomic bonds of the matter in a neutron star, crushing protons and electrons together into neutrons. This is how they get their name. A star that used to be more than a million kilometers wide is now less than 20 kilometers across. This material is so dense, that a single sugar cube's worth weigh about 100 million tonnes on Earth. And you would need to be traveling 100,000 km/s to escape a neutron star's pull - about 1/3rd the speed of light. So that's how you get a neutron star. But what about these pulsars? When these stars collapse, they maintain their angular momentum. But with a much smaller size, their rotational speed increases dramatically, spinning many times a second. This relatively tiny, super dense object, emits a powerful blast of radiation along its magnetic field lines. Although this beam of radiation doesn't necessarily line up with it's axis of rotation. And so, from here on Earth, astronomers detect an intense beam of radio emissions several times a second, as it rotates around like a lighthouse beam. This is a pulsar. The first one was detected in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewis. They detected a mysterious radio emission coming from a fixed point in the sky that peaked every 1.33 seconds. Although they were certain it had a natural origin, they named it LGM-1, which stands for "little green men", and subsequent discoveries have helped astronomers discover the true nature of these strange objects. Pulsars have been discovered emitting many different wavelengths of light, from radio to visible and even X and gamma rays. There have been a total of 1600 found so far, and the fastest discovered emits 716 pulses a second. When a pulsar first forms, it has the most energy and fastest rotational speed. As it releases electromagnetic power through its beams, it gradually slows down. Within 10 to 100 million years, it slows to the point that its beams shut off and the pulsar becomes quiet. When they are active, they spin with such uncanny regularity that they're used as timers by astronomers. Pulsars help us search for gravitational waves, probe the interstellar medium, and even find extrasolar planets in orbit. It has even been proposed that spacecraft could use them as beacons to help navigate around the Solar System. On NASA's Voyager spacecraft, there are maps that show the direction of the Sun to 14 pulsars in our region. If aliens wanted to find our home planet, they couldn't ask for a more accurate map. I hope that helps, William.
The three types of neutron stars and the characteristics that define them. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Here's a big mystery in astronomy: fast radio bursts. Brief shrieks of radio waves coming from space. What are they? Where do they come from? Astronomers have no idea. Sponsored by the .space domain name. Go to and use the code "GUIDETOSPACE" to get a domain for $2.99. Sign up to my weekly email newsletter: Support us at:Support us at: : More stories at Follow us on Twitter: @universetoday Like us on Facebook: Google+ - Instagram - Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com /Karla Thompson - @karlaii Chad Weber - Chloe Cain - Instagram: @chloegwen2001
Artist’s depiction of a neutron star. Credit – ESO / L Calcada Magnetars are some of the most fascinating astronomical objects. One teaspoon of the stuff they are made out of would weigh almost one billion tons, and they have magnetic fields that are hundreds of millions of times more powerful than any magnetic that exists today on Earth. But we don’t know much about how they form. A new paper points to one possible source – mergers of neutron stars.
Magnetars are neutron stars with massively boosted magnetic fields. How do this stellar remnants form, and what would happen if you got too close to one? Follow us on Twitter: @universetoday Like us on Facebook: Instagram - Support us at:Support us at: Instagram - Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com /Karla Thompson - @karlaii Chad Weber - Chloe Cain - Instagram: @chloegwen2001 Chloe Cain - Instagram: @chloegwen2001 Music: Left Spine Down - “X-Ray” Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com Karla Thompson - @karlaii / Karla Thompson's youtube channel Chad Weber - weber.chad@gmail.com Chloe Cain - Instagram: @chloegwen2001
Astronomers have made the groundbreaking detection of two neutron stars colliding in a galaxy 130 million light years away. They detected the gravitational waves AND the blast of radiation released from the collision, observing a kilonova for the first time. Follow us on Twitter: @universetoday Like us on Facebook: Instagram - Support us at:Support us at: Instagram - Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com /Karla Thompson - @karlaii Chad Weber - Chloe Cain - Instagram: @chloegwen2001 Chloe Cain - Instagram: @chloegwen2001 Music: Left Spine Down - “X-Ray” Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / frasercain@gmail.com Karla Thompson - @karlaii / Karla Thompson's youtube channel Chad Weber - weber.chad@gmail.com Chloe Cain - Instagram: @chloegwen2001
How can array of pulsars can pinpoint binary black holes. Credit: Carl Knox/OzGrav
Multiple pulsars can pinpoint the source of gravitational waves. Credit: Kato & Takahashi
Relativistic Shapiro delay measurements of an extremely massive millisecond pulsar(PDF)
Einstein@Home aggregates the computer power of hundreds of thousands of volunteers from 193 countries, to search for new neutron stars using data from electromagnetic and gravitational-wave detectors. This paper presents a detailed description of the search for new radio pulsars using Pulsar ALFA survey data from the Arecibo Observatory. The enormous computing power allows this search to cover a new region of parameter space; it can detect pulsars in binary systems with orbital periods as short as 11 minutes. We also describe the first Einstein@Home discovery, the 40.8 Hz isolated pulsar PSR J2007+2722, and provide a full timing model. PSR J2007+2722’s pulse profile is remarkably wide with emission over almost the entire spin period. This neutron star is most likely a disrupted recycled pulsar, about as old as its characteristic spin-down age of 404 Myr. However, there is a small chance that it was born recently, with a low magnetic field. If so, upper limits on the X-ray flux suggest but cannot prove that PSR J2007+2722 is at least ∼100 kyr old. In the future, we expect that the massive computing power provided by volunteers should enable many additional radio pulsar discoveries. Key words: binaries: close – gravitational waves – methods: data analysis – pulsars: general – pulsars: individual (PSR J2007+2722) – surveys Online-only material: color figures
his question comes from William. He writes "Hi Fraser, I was wondering if you could do a video on pulsars like you did on quasars." You got it. Stars are held in perfect balance between the pressure of gravity pulling them inward, and the outward force of radiation. Once stars runs out of fuel, they collapses in on themselves - it's the amount of mass decides what happens next. The most massive stars detonate as supernovae, and can explode or collapse into black holes. If they're less massive, like our Sun, they blast away their outer layers and then slowly cool down as white dwarfs. But for stars between 1.4 and 3.2 times the mass of the Sun, they may still become supernovae, but they just don't have enough mass to make a black hole. These medium mass objects end their lives as neutron stars, and some of these can become pulsars or magnetars. Gravity overwhelms the atomic bonds of the matter in a neutron star, crushing protons and electrons together into neutrons. This is how they get their name. A star that used to be more than a million kilometers wide is now less than 20 kilometers across. This material is so dense, that a single sugar cube's worth weigh about 100 million tonnes on Earth. And you would need to be traveling 100,000 km/s to escape a neutron star's pull - about 1/3rd the speed of light. So that's how you get a neutron star. But what about these pulsars? When these stars collapse, they maintain their angular momentum. But with a much smaller size, their rotational speed increases dramatically, spinning many times a second. This relatively tiny, super dense object, emits a powerful blast of radiation along its magnetic field lines. Although this beam of radiation doesn't necessarily line up with it's axis of rotation. And so, from here on Earth, astronomers detect an intense beam of radio emissions several times a second, as it rotates around like a lighthouse beam. This is a pulsar. The first one was detected in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewis. They detected a mysterious radio emission coming from a fixed point in the sky that peaked every 1.33 seconds. Although they were certain it had a natural origin, they named it LGM-1, which stands for "little green men", and subsequent discoveries have helped astronomers discover the true nature of these strange objects. Pulsars have been discovered emitting many different wavelengths of light, from radio to visible and even X and gamma rays. There have been a total of 1600 found so far, and the fastest discovered emits 716 pulses a second. When a pulsar first forms, it has the most energy and fastest rotational speed. As it releases electromagnetic power through its beams, it gradually slows down. Within 10 to 100 million years, it slows to the point that its beams shut off and the pulsar becomes quiet. When they are active, they spin with such uncanny regularity that they're used as timers by astronomers. Pulsars help us search for gravitational waves, probe the interstellar medium, and even find extrasolar planets in orbit. It has even been proposed that spacecraft could use them as beacons to help navigate around the Solar System. On NASA's Voyager spacecraft, there are maps that show the direction of the Sun to 14 pulsars in our region. If aliens wanted to find our home planet, they couldn't ask for a more accurate map. I hope that helps, William.
Scientists have reached a new frontier in our understanding of pulsars, the dense, whirling remains of exploded stars, thanks to observations from NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER). Data from this X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station has produced the first precise and dependable measurements of both a pulsar’s size and its mass. The pulsar in question, J0030+0451 (J0030 for short), is a solitary pulsar that lies 1,100 light-years away in the constellation Pisces. While measuring the pulsar's heft and proportions, NICER revealed that the shapes and locations of million-degree hot spots on the pulsar’s surface are much stranger than generally thought. Using NICER observations from July 2017 to December 2018, two groups of scientists mapped J0030’s hot spots using independent methods and converged on nearly identical results for its mass and size. One team, led by researchers at the University of Amsterdam, determined the pulsar is around 1.3 times the Sun’s mass, 15.8 miles (25.4 kilometers) across and has two hot spots — one small and circular, the other long and crescent-shaped. A second team found J0030 is about 1.4 times the Sun’s mass, about 16.2 miles (26 kilometers) wide and has two or three oval-shaped hot spots. All spots in all models are in the pulsar’s southern hemisphere — unlike textbook images where the spots lie on opposite sides other at each magnetic poles. : Read more Music: "Uncertain Ahead" and "Flowing Cityscape" (underscore). Both from Universal Production Music Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scott Wiessinger (USRA): Producer Jeanette Kazmierczak (University of Maryland College Park): Science Writer Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park): Science Writer Michael Lentz (USRA): Animator Barb Mattson (University of Maryland College Park): Narrator Zaven Arzoumanian (NASA/GSFC): Scientist This video is public domain and along with other supporting visualizations can be downloaded from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio at: If you liked this video, subscribe to the NASA Goddard YouTube channel: Follow NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center ·Instagram ·Twitter Nasa Goddard ·Twitter Nasa Goddard Pics · Facebook: ·Flickr