| Description |
Our own Milky Way Galaxy (MWG) is a large laboratory containing many stars, gas, dust, and peculiar objects. A similar laboratory where we can resolve stars is our neighbouring satellite galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is only a fiftieth the mass of the MWG, but harbours many massive stars, stars at least eight times the mass of our Sun. Smaller stars like our Sun will live for ~10 billion years before it will start to run out of Hydrogen in their cores, however massive stars will deplete their Hydrogen supply within ~10 million years. This is still much longer than a human lifespan, meaning that we cannot observe a single star throughout its lifetime, but we can observe many different stars at different stages in their life to gain understanding of how stars evolve as a whole. A massive star's life will end in a supernova - essentially a big explosion, propelling hot gas into space forming an extended object known as a supernova remnant (SNR). In addition to the SNR a compact object (neutron star or black hole) will be formed, in the case of a neutron star it will be rotating rapidly, completing up to a 1000 revolutions per second. Detecting these neutron stars in the SMC will help us learn more about the young neutron star population, their evolution, and if they are found in binary with other massive stars, they will provide critical information on the formation rates of double neutron star binaries.
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