supernova remnant

Exploring the Milky Way’s Nucleus

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Here is an edge-on illustration of our Milky Way Galaxy. (Keep in mind that the disk actually stretches quite a bit farther out from the budge than is apparent in this illustration. Proportionally, its full diameter makes its thickness less than that of a pizza crust.)

What if I asked you to imagine what that central bulge would look like to us–lifeforms living inside the galaxy? What would you imagine?

Perhaps you’d imagine looking inwards toward a glowing ball of light. Perhaps you’d imagine a region of our sky unusually thick with stars and interstellar clouds. Or perhaps you’d imagine something entirely different.

But…would you imagine this?

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Unique Neutron Stars

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Neutron stars—the compact remains of massive stars that have gone supernova—are some of the most extreme objects in the universe, narrowly beaten by black holes (and, as we’ll talk about in future posts, active galaxies and such).

Dense balls of pure neutron material with diameters barely larger than Los Angeles, neutron stars have strong magnetic fields that produce beams of radiation at the magnetic poles. Their speedy rotation makes these beams sweep across the sky like a lighthouse.

When one of their beams crosses directly over Earth, human astronomers observe rapid pulses of light called pulsars.

These objects are whacky, to say the least. And there’s more…

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Pulsars as Neutron Stars

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For those of you who missed my last couple of posts, allow me to introduce the neutron star: a stellar remnant similar to a white dwarf, but much denser, so dense that its protons and electrons have combined to form a neutron soup.

A neutron star forms from the collapsing core of a star between 10 and 20 M☉ (solar masses). Its collapse produces powerful magnetic fields and extremely high temperatures, but because it becomes so small—less than the size of Los Angeles—it is very faint and radiates away its heat very slowly.

The exception to that rule comes in the form of two powerful beams of radiation that blast away from the object’s magnetic poles. As a neutron star spins—at around a hundred times per second—these radiation beams sweep across the sky like the the beams of a lighthouse.

If these beams happen to sweep over Earth, human observers see regular, rapid pulses of light. This visual phenomenon produced by neutron stars is called a pulsar.

Now that we have a basic understanding of neutron stars and pulsars, let’s explore some of the details of how these extreme objects work.

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What is a Pulsar?

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Imagine you’re observing the sky with a radio telescope. Observing the faintest, lowest-energy photons the universe has to offer is your specialty. You study interstellar dust clouds, protostars, and lots more.

One day, though, something interesting pops up in your data. You’re looking at raw data on a computer screen, not an eyepiece of a “typical” (optical) telescope—you get all your data from the giant dish above. Strangely enough, there’s a series of regular pulses.

At first, you think it’s just “noise” from sources on Earth—like static on your car radio. But then you see it, day after day, in the same place in the sky. It’s not static. It’s real.

You wonder if this is perhaps evidence of contact with a distant civilization. Personally, I’d hope for that one. Unfortunately, more research leads to the conclusion that it’s nothing of the sort—within weeks, you find that there are several other objects in completely different parts of the sky, all emitting similar (but different) pulses.

You’ve discovered a pulsar. But…what exactly is a pulsar?

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Why Neutron Stars Should Exist

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Above is a theoretical rendering of a white dwarf, the collapsed husk of a low-mass or medium-mass star. Interestingly enough, these strange cosmic objects—which begin their existence as intensely hot balls of carbon the size of the Earth—may eventually cool off and crystalize into giant space diamonds.

White dwarfs are made up of free-floating hydrogen and helium nuclei and degenerate electrons—and their mass is supported by the nature of these electrons.

But degenerate electrons, like any other material, have a specific material strength. What happens if they’ve, well…just got too much stuff to support?

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What Exactly are Supernovae?

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This is one topic I bet you guys have been looking forward to since I first started posting about stellar evolution. Well, I won’t disappoint you!

In my last post, we covered how a massive star gets to the point of supernova. When it exhausts all the nuclear fuel in its core, iron ash is left behind—which can’t be fused or split for energy. That’s a dead end for the star, and the core begins to freely collapse…

Until a shockwave, originating in the center of the star, pushes outward. It’s stalled at first, but convection as in-falling material bounces off the dense core gives it a boost, and the star bursts apart.

Now, we’ll cover all the ins and outs of these spectacular explosions.

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