Parkes telescope finds new kind of star

[telfrow]

<i>An international team of astronomers using CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia has found a new kind of cosmic object. <br /><br />An international team of astronomers using CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia has found a new kind of cosmic object — small, compressed ‘neutron stars’ that show no activity most of the time but once in a while spit out a single burst of radio waves. The discovery will be published in this week’s issue of the journal Nature. <br /><br />The new objects — dubbed Rotating Radio Transients or RRATs — are likely to be related to conventional radio pulsars (small stars that emit regular pulses of radio waves, up to hundreds of times a second). But the new objects probably far outnumber their old cousins, the scientists say. <br /><br />Eleven RRATs have been found, first detected by the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey and then observed again several times. Their isolated bursts last for between two and 30 milliseconds. In between, for times ranging from four minutes to three hours, they are silent. <br /><br />'These things were very difficult to pin down,' says CSIRO’s Dr Dick Manchester, a member of the research team and a veteran pulsar hunter. 'For each object we’ve been detecting radio emission for less than one second a day. And because these are single bursts, we’ve had to take great care to distinguish them from terrestrial radio interference.' </i><br /><br /> Full Story<br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <strong><font color="#3366ff">Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yeild.</font> - <font color="#3366ff"><em>Tennyson</em></font></strong> </div>