Astronomers know very well that our Milky Way galaxy is teeming with stars, planets, black holes, and other cosmic objects. But still, they sometimes remain speechless by new mysterious structures that they have trouble trying to understand.
ScienceAlert.com brings the exciting news that an extremely rare object was found in our own galaxy, and it’s a rare type of star – an accreting X-ray millisecond pulsar, to be more precise.
The world knows only 19 pulsars, such as MAXI J1816-195
MAXI J1816-195 is the name of the newfound object in question, and it’s just one out of 19 objects of its kind that were ever found by astronomers. The millisecond pulsar is located 70,000 light-years away from Earth, which is not exactly a big distance judging by an astronomical scale.
Jamie Kennea, an astrophysicist from the Pennsylvania State University, along with colleagues, used the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to see the location of the space object and confirm its discovery.
In a notice that was posted to ATel, the researchers explained:
This location does not lie at the location of any known catalogued X-ray source, therefore we agree that this is a new transient source MAXI J1816-195,
In addition, archival observations by Swift/XRT of this region taken in 2017 June 22, do not reveal any point source at this location.
A pulsar is also a neutron star, but it needs to follow some specific rules. Pulsars need to be the collapsed cores of a massive dying stars that have been through a supernova, which is the definition of a neutron star. But at the same time, pulsars need to unleash beams of radiation from their poles.
The Milky Way has over 200 billion stars. It features an invisible halo. It’s dusty and gassy, and so on. In other words, astronomers will always have some homework to do regarding our galaxy.