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The Pulsar Day Thread

tereglith

Astronomers have obtained the first clear look at a dusty disk closely encircling a massive baby star, providing direct evidence that massive stars do form in the same way as their smaller brethren - and closing an enduring debate. This artist's concept shows what such a massive disk might look like.The flared disk extends to about 130 times the Earth-sun distance, and has a mass similar to that of the star, roughly twenty times the sun. The inner parts of the disk are shown to be devoid of dust.

51 years ago today, the first Pulsar was discovered!

Pulsars are massive, rotating, neutron stars from the earliest stages of the universe. They shoot out two massive beams of electromagnetic radiation which pass by the Earth like a lighthouse’s ray, creating the appearance of a regular periodic ‘pulse’. When first discovered, they were suspected by some to be communications from extraterrestrial intelligences. Once we figure out the truth, they were still exciting – their unusual properties make them ideal testing grounds for novel astronomical observation methods. Pulsars were involved in our first detection of gravitational radiation and our first direct observation of exoplanets.

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