Most energetic light observed from Crab Pulsar

Researchers have observed the most energetic light ever detected in the universe. The record-breaking pulsar was detected from ‘Crab Pulsar’, a neutron star in the centre of a supernova of 1054 AD. The pulses were found by the scientists working with the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) observatory in the Canary Islands. The pulsar is emitting trillion electron volt (TeV) energies, violating all the theory models believed to be at work in neutron stars.

Crab Pulsar

The Crab Pulsar is a young neutron star situated at 6,500 light years away from Earth. It is the corpse left over when the star that created the Crab nebula exploded as a supernova. It has a mass of 1.5 the mass of the sun concentrated in about 10km diameter object, rotates 30 times per second. It is surrounded by a huge magnetic field 10 thousand billion times stronger than that of the Sun.

Pulsars are rotating, highly magnetised neutron stars. These neutron stars also have extremely strong magnetic fields which accelerate charged particles. The radiation from them sweeps across the sky in a cone shaped beam. When the beam sweeps over earth, it becomes visible as a pulsar. British astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to discover a pulsar in 1967 when she spotted a radio pulsar.