If an ice skater tucks in her arms as she twirls, her spin will also speed up. If you squash a big spinning star, its spin speeds up.
They have had all the space squeezed out of them, collapsing electrons onto protons, leaving a sphere of neutral neutrons. Neutron stars are so called because normal atoms inside them no longer exist. It is the spinning relic of a neutron star, the superdense, no-longer-shining core of a large star that got fatally compressed in a supernova implosion.
Now, we know that a pulsar is better described as a zombie. For a while, these cosmic radio sources were called LGM – Little Green Men! Discoverers Jocelyn Bell and Antony Hewish noticed that these beats were so regular that they seemed manmade. As the star spins, the beam swings past, and we detect a pulse of radio waves.įrom the Earth, a pulsar looks like a star that has a pulse, a rapid beat picked up only by radio telescopes. Coming out of the poles are jets of charged particles escaping the star (yellow). Artist’s depiction of a pulsar with the central, spinning neutron star and its powerful magnetic field (blue).
