neutron stars tagged posts

Physicists show that neutron stars may be shrouded in clouds of ‘axions’ — and that these clouds can teach us a lot. A team of physicists from the universities of Amsterdam, Princeton and Oxford have shown that extremely light particles known as axions may occur in large clouds around neutron stars...

In creating five new isotopes, an international research team working at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB, at Michigan State University has brought the stars closer to Earth.

The isotopes — known as thulium-182, thulium-183, ytterbium-186, ytterbium-187 and lutetium-190 — were reported Feb.

15 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

These represent the first batch of new isotopes made at FRIB, a user facility for the U.S...

We have just published evidence in Nature Astronomy for what might be producing mysterious bursts of radio waves coming from distant galaxies, known as fast radio bursts or FRBs.

Two colliding neutron stars—each the super-dense core of an exploded star—produced a burst of gravitational waves when they merged into a “supramassive” neutron star. We found that two and a half hours later they produced an FRB when the neutron star collapsed into a black hole.

Or so we think. The key piece of evidence that would confirm or refute our theory—an optical or gamma-ray flash coming from the direction of the fast radio burst—vanished almost four years ago. In a few months, we might get another chance to find out if we are correct.

Brief and powerful
FRBs are in...

Space scientists may need to rethink how gamma-ray bursts are formed after new research shows new-born supramassive stars, not black holes, are sometimes responsible for these huge extragalactic bursts of energy.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been detected by satellites orbiting Earth as luminous flashes of the most energetic gamma-ray radiation lasting milliseconds to hundreds of seconds. These catastrophic blasts occur in distant galaxies, billions of light years from Earth.

A sub-type of GRB known as a short-duration GRB starts life when two neutron stars collide...