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Glitch in Neutron Star reveals its Hidden Secrets

During the glitch the star started spinning even faster
An artistic impression of the three components in the neutron star. Credit: Carl Knox.

Neutron stars are not only the most dense objects in the Universe, but they rotate very fast and regularly. Until they don’t. Occasionally these neutron stars start to spin faster, caused by portions of the inside of the star moving outwards. It’s called a “glitch” and it provides astronomers a brief insight into what lies within these mysterious objects.

In a paper published today in the journal, Nature Astronomy, a team from Monash University, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), McGill University in Canada, and the University of Tasmania, studied the Vela Pulsar, a neutron star in the southern sky, that is 1,000 light years away.

According to the paper’s ...

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