A team led by Mayurish Sorens of the Indian Institute of Science and Education Bhopal, while analyzing radio observations of a rapidly rotating neutron star (pulsar), found a strange periodic signal that could not be assigned to any known object and which disappeared again after a short time. The researchers suspect that a magnetar is behind the event, that is, a pulsar with a very strong magnetic field. The results will appear in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters and are already on a pre-print server arXiv can access.
Scientists evaluated maps from the South African MeerKAT radio telescope, which shows the already known pulsar PSR J1708-3506 in and around the constellation Scorpius. Data were collected over a period of 66 observational periods spread over a period of three years. An observation on June 21, 2021 revealed a periodic signal that was not from PSR J1708-3506. The telescope recorded a total of 97 radio pulses at intervals of 10.4 seconds. The shape and duration of the individual pulses are reminiscent of those in magnetars, even if the interval of more than ten seconds is on the high end of typical values. However, the absence of a signal in the other 65 observation periods is unusual. Because the magnetosphere is already known to produce bursts of high-energy radiation in the gamma-ray and X-ray range, the team looked at archival data from other telescopes.
Completely mute the radio
The team combed data from the Swift, Fermi, and INTEGRAL satellites for gamma-ray bursts, the Digital Sky Survey (DSS) for visible sources, and the 2-micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) for infrared. The archives of other radio telescopes were also combed to reveal the location of the MeerKAT signals. Finally, the researchers made their new observations in the X-ray range. All with the same result: The newly discovered magnetar—now named PSR J1710-3452—not only went silent again in the radio band, but also showed no emissions at all at other wavelengths.
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