|
Post by Shadow on Sept 4, 2005 10:47:54 GMT -5
New Scientist Space11:11 01 September 2005 NewScientist.com news service Kelly Young Astronomers have spotted the fastest moving stellar corpse to date – and it appears to be headed straight out of our galaxy. A team from the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, clocked the dead star at 1100 kilometres per second. The object, called B1508+55, is a rotating neutron star, or pulsar. It is the superdense core of a massive star that exploded as a supernova about 2.5 million years ago. The explosion seems to have ejected the pulsar with such force that it will eventually escape the Milky Way entirely, says team member Shami Chatterjee, an astronomer with NRAO and CfA. However, current simulations of supernovae have never produced such breakneck speeds. In the models, the newly formed neutron star starts out fast but soon slows down when material from the outer layers of the exploded star crashes back onto it. In 2004, the first 3D model of a supernova found that the blast could send a neutron star flying at about 200 kilometres per second - nearly six times slower than the new record holder.
|
|