LONDON: Researchers have spotted the most luminous gamma-ray pulsar ever found — and the rapidly spinning, ultradense stellar core is also the first pulsar of its kind ever seen outside the Milky Way.
A group analyzing data from the orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope’s Large Area Telescope discovered the extraordinary object in an area bursting with star activity: the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way. Scientists have previously seen this specific pulsar emitting other wavelengths of light (such as X-rays), but this is the first detection of a pulsar outside the Milky Way blasting high-powered gamma-rays.
The new measurements show that pulsars are much more varied in the amount and kinds of light they emit than astronomers previously thought, and point the way to better model how these massive powerhouses generate so much energy.
