Vela Pulsar Releases Powerful Energy Hitting Earth That Will Sizzle Humans to a Crisp When Exposed to It

A dead star recently emitted the highest-energy gamma rays, which could have endangered humans. Scientists were baffled by the incident and couldn't fully explain it.

Dead Star Vela Pulsar Releases Powerful Energy

A new study revealed that a global team of researchers detected the highest energy gamma rays from a dead star, Vela Pulsar, utilizing deep observations with H.E.S.S. It was discovered that the gamma rays released by Vela Pulsar had an amazing energy level of 20 tera-electronvolts, or roughly ten trillion times the energy of visible light.

The powerful energy that hit Earth was so strong that scientists could not comprehend it properly. If humans were exposed to the intense gamma rays, we would sizzle to death.

Vela pulsar is the brightest pulsar in the radio region of the electromagnetic spectrum and the most significant generator of cosmic gamma rays in the giga-electronvolt (GeV) range. It is located in the Southern sky within the constellation Vela and rotates about 11 times every second. Previously, it was thought to stop producing radiation above a few GeV because electrons may have reached the magnetosphere's boundary and exited.

According to co-author Christo Venter from North-West University in South Africa, the radiation is nearly 200 times more energetic than any radiation previously identified from the object. The phase intervals for this extremely high-energy component coincide with the one seen in the GeV range. To reach this energy, the rotating emission pattern must hold up even if the electrons go further than the magnetosphere.

According to the study's lead author, Arache Djannati-Atai of the Astroparticle & Cosmology (APC) laboratory in France, the finding challenges their prior understanding of pulsars. It necessitates a revision of our understanding of how these natural accelerators operate. He added that the conventional model cannot fully explain data, which proposes that particles are accelerated along magnetic field lines inside or just outside the magnetosphere. He questioned why they saw particle acceleration through the so-called magnetic reconnection process outside the light cylinder, which somehow manages to keep the circular pattern.

Experts have trouble explaining how such intense radiation is created. Whatever the reason, the Vela pulsar currently holds the record for having the highest-energy gamma rays ever discovered, in addition to all its other accolades.

With the help of current and upcoming more sensitive gamma-ray telescopes, this discovery opens a new observation window for the detection of other pulsars in the tens of teraelectronvolt range, establishing the way for improved comprehension of the extreme acceleration processes in highly magnetized astrophysical objects, Djannati-Atai said.

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What Are Pulsars?

Pulsars are neutron stars that rotate quickly and emit radiation pulses at regular intervals of a few seconds to a few milliseconds. They produce two potent beams of light, one from each magnetic pole, due to strong magnetic fields that funnel particles along their magnetic polar axes and accelerate them to relativistic speeds. The magnetic field's poles aren't parallel to the pulsar's spin axis, so the beams of particles and the light they create are thrown around when it rotates.

However, suppose the pulsar is close to a star partner. In that case, it may be "recycled," which means it will take material and energy from the companion and increase its spin to hundreds of times per second, giving the previously dead pulsar new life. A pulsar can undergo this transformation at any point during its lifetime, which means the rotation rate of a " dying " pulsar may increase over hundreds to millions of years. A senior scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia, Scott Ransom, described the pair of objects as a "low-mass X-ray binary" when the pulsar starts to emit X-rays.