P564 - Studying the magnetar XTE J1810-197
CSIRO RDS Repository
View Archive InfoField | Value | |
Title |
P564 - Studying the magnetar XTE J1810-197
|
|
Subject |
Astronomical and Space Sciences not elsewhere classified
|
|
Description |
Neutron stars are extreme objects, the size of a city but containing the mass of the Sun. Pulsars are neutron stars with very strong magnetic fields that rotate rapidly and emit focused beams of radio waves that we may detect on Earth once with every turn of the star, in light-house-like fashion. While the typical pulsar has a magnetic field strength at its surface approximately a million million times stronger than Earth's, a special and rare (only a dozen are known) class of neutron stars has a field up to another factor of 1000 stronger - these are the "magnetars", the most magnetic objects known in the Universe. Magnetars shine in ways that are different from those of ordinary pulsars. For many years, despite careful searches, no magnetar was seen to shine at radio wavelengths. The object of our program, XTE J1810-197, is different - alone among the magnetars it emits remarkable radio pulses with every turn of the star, every 5.5 seconds, that we first detected using the Parkes 64-metre dish in March 2006. We are now trying to learn more about the characteristics of this radiation. |
|
Publisher |
CSIRO
|
|
Date |
2022-07-28
|
|
Identifier |
csiro:P564
|
|
Language |
eng
|
|