The pulses come from the millisecond pulsar PSR B1744-24A, which is located inside the globular cluster Terzan 5, about 19, 2 thousand light years away. New research into the properties of these impulses would help to understand their nature.
Pulsar is a cosmic source of various kinds of radiation that comes to the Earth in the form of periodic pulses; it is a rotating neutron star. The pulsar under study, whose rotation period is 11.56 milliseconds, has a companion star of a small mass - no more than 10 percent of the mass of the Sun.
Observing the object, astronomers drew attention to a sharp decrease in the intensity of radiation in the radio range and rather powerful pulses, the intensity of which is 40 times higher than the average for the same burst width.
“Our work includes a study of unusually bright single pulses (BSPs) from a millisecond pulsar in the B1744-24A bilimator system based on several different observations from the Green Bank telescope. We believe that powerful lensing of pulses occurs in the case of the pulsar B1744-24A,”the astronomers write in their article. The study itself is available at arxiv.org.
An example of a bright single pulse integrated between 1,100-1,900 MHz / © Anna Bilous
A team of scientists from the University of Amsterdam, led by Anna Bilous, used data from observations of this object from the 100-meter Green Bank telescope in 2009 to study the properties of these bright pulses. The scientists found that the properties of the pulses under study cannot be attributed to ordinary giant pulses: they are rather similar to the bursts of another pulsar, which is called the Black Widow (PSR B1957 + 20). Taking into account the fact that the pulses coming from the Black Widow pulsar turned out to be lensed, the authors of the work concluded that only this can explain the pulses of the PSR B1744-24A pulsar.
Astronomers emphasize that further observations of bright single pulses from pulsars may be useful for understanding the region of radiation in their magnetosphere.