2023-10-20 20:42:22
Remnant of a star
Such an object represents all that remains of a once-larger star that, having exhausted its fuel, collapsed in on itself. In the category of hypermassive and hyperdense objects, only black holes surpass pulsars.
We have detected thousands of them, but only four which emit gamma rays of such power that these can also be detected by our telescopes.
And of these four, Vela, located 960 light years from Earth, saw each photon making up its gamma rays exceed 1 teraelectronvolt (TeV) — “Tera” meaning 1000 billion, or the number 10 followed by 12 zeros.
The most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the LHC, located on the French-Swiss border, has in recent years reached the record level of 13 TeV.
200 times more powerful than the “average” pulsar
However, it appears that Vela is doing even better: gamma rays exceeding 20 TeV were detected by a team led by Arache Djannati-Ataï, from the Paris Observatory, from data collected by a high energy observatory located in Namibia (High Energy Stereoscopic System).
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#pulsar #thwarts #astrophysicists #expectations