The Fate of the Stars
All scenes › Chapter 3 A heavy star: supernova and neutron star
Pulsar
A spinning star that sweeps beams like a lighthouse
View in 3DA lighthouse in space
A newborn neutron star spins very fast. The one at the heart of the Crab Nebula turns about 30 times every second. Beams of light shoot out from its two magnetic poles, and because those poles are tilted away from the spin axis, the beams sweep around like a lighthouse. Each time a beam brushes past Earth, it blinks, so we call it a pulsar.
Why?If you spin on an office chair and pull your arms in, you turn faster. When the center of a huge star shrinks to the size of a city, it speeds up enormously for the same reason.
Learn moreIn 1967, Jocelyn Bell, a graduate student in Britain, found a radio signal that repeated exactly every 1.3 seconds or so. It was the first pulsar. The spin on screen is shown far slower than in real life.
- When
- About 12 million years old
- Star we are watching
- Pulsar
- Size · state
- About 30 turns per second (Crab Pulsar) · slowed down on screen
Read more
Wikipedia: Pulsar · Wikipedia: Crab Pulsar · Wikipedia: Jocelyn Bell Burnell
More in the series
Lifetimes and sizes are typical values from models of how stars change (approximate). The black hole horizon size and the teaspoon masses are calculated with official constants. Sizes, distances and speeds in the 3D view are a rough sketch.