What sounds like a stomach-turning ride at an amusement park might hold the key to unravelling the mysterious mechanism that causes beams of radio waves to shoot out from pulsars \u2212 super-magnetic rotating stars in our Galaxy.<\/p>\n
New research from Curtin University, obtained using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope located in the Western Australian outback, suggests the answer could lie in a \u2018drifting carousel\u2019 found in a special class of pulsars.<\/p>\n
Curtin PhD student Sam McSweeney, who led the research as part of his PhD project with the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), described pulsars as extremely dense neutron stars that emit beams of radio waves.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese pulsars weigh about half a million times the mass of the Earth but are only 20km across,\u201d Mr McSweeney said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are nicknamed \u2018lighthouses in space\u2019 because they appear to \u2018pulse\u2019 once per rotation period, and their sweeping light signal can be seen through telescopes at exceptionally regular intervals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thousands of pulsars have been seen since their first discovery in the late 1960s, but questions still remain as to why these stars emit radio beams in the first place, and what type of emission model best describes the radio waves, or \u2018light\u2019, that we see.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe classical pulsar model pictures the emission that is shooting out from the magnetic poles of the pulsar as a light cone,\u201d Mr McSweeney said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the signal that we observe with our telescopes suggests a much more complex structure behind this emission \u2013 probably coming from several emission regions, not just one.\u201d<\/p>\n