Glossary term: Pulsar
Description: A pulsar is a rapidly rotating neutron star whose intense magnetic fields produce two intense beams of radiation in opposite directions. This radiation can be detected as a brief pulse by radio telescopes as it sweeps past our line of sight. Pulsars are about 10–20 kilometers across with a typical mass of about one and a half times that of our Sun. They spin about once to several hundred times a second and can act as very precise celestial clocks. Some pulsars have been detected as gamma ray or X-ray sources. Over 3000 have been detected in our Galaxy. In addition, around 30 of them have also been detected outside the Milky Way in the Magellanic Clouds. Pulsars are useful as probes of the interstellar medium, as a test of general relativity, and potentially useful for detecting gravitational waves from black hole mergers.
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Term and definition status: This term and its definition have been approved by a research astronomer and a teacher
The OAE Multilingual Glossary is a project of the IAU Office of Astronomy for Education (OAE) in collaboration with the IAU Office of Astronomy Outreach (OAO). The terms and definitions were chosen, written and reviewed by a collective effort from the OAE, the OAE Centers and Nodes, the OAE National Astronomy Education Coordinators (NAECs) and other volunteers. You can find a full list of credits here. All glossary terms and their definitions are released under a Creative Commons CC BY-4.0 license and should be credited to "IAU OAE".
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In Other Languages
- Arabic: النجم النابض
- German: Pulsar
- French: Pulsar
- Hindi: पल्सार
- Italian: Pulsar
- Japanese: パルサー (external link)
- Marathi: पल्सार
- Brazilian Portuguese: Pulsar
- Simplified Chinese: 脉冲星
- Traditional Chinese: 脈衝星
Related Media
The Crab Pulsar
Caption: At the heart of the Crab Nebula, situated approximately 6,500 light-years away in the constellation of Taurus, lies the Crab Nebula Pulsar. This is remnant of a massive star that exploded at the end of its life. This happened several thousand years ago but the light from this explosion only reached the Earth in the year 1054. This celestial event was viewed by people across the world with many different societies noting it in their records.
The Crab Nebula Pulsar rotates about 30 times per second and emits light in many different wavelengths, including the visible spectrum. It is roughly one and a half times the mass of the sun but the force of the explosion that formed it crammed this mass into a tiny space, roughly ten kilometres in radius.
This image is a composite of several observations conducted by the Gemini North observatory in Hawaii, USA. The pulsar can be seen at the center. The observations that this image was created from were taken over a period of five years. Data from 2009 is shown in blue and data from 2014 is shown in red. Over this time material has flowed away from the pulsar resulting in this colored ripple effect. Again the colors do not show real colors in the image, the ripples show the positions of the shockwaves as they moved away from the pulsar and hit into the surrounding gas.
Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AUR, Jen Miller, Travis Rector, Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin
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