Observations at various wavelengths are still ongoing. (Pixabay / Representative photo)
Researchers have recently found a new member of a strange category of a star in the Milky Way. According to Science Alert, the star is so rare that so far only a handful of them have been found. It’s called MAXI J1816-195 and it’s not more than 30,000 light-years away.
From initial observations and research, astronomers believe that the ultra-rare cosmic object is a millisecond pulsar of accretion X-rays, a category of stars of which only 18 are known to date. It was first detected on June 7 by the Japanese Space Agency’s Instrument Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) mounted outside the International Space Station (ISS).
Science Alert reported that a team led by astrophysicist Hitoshi Negoro of Nihon University in Japan explained that they had identified an unclassified X-ray source located in the galactic plane between the constellations Sagittarius, Scutum and Serpens. They said it was becoming relatively bright, but that they had not been able to identify it from the MAXI data.
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Shortly afterwards, other astronauts began to contribute. Using the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory Space Telescope, astrophysicist Jamie Kennea of ​​Pennysylvania State University and colleagues went to the location to confirm the detection with an independent instrument and locate it.
The telescope saw the object in X-rays, but not in optical or ultraviolet light, at the location specified by the MAXI observations. The astronauts then used the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), a NASA X-ray instrument also mounted on the ISS.
Interestingly, NICER collected X-ray pulses at 528.6 Hz, suggesting that the thing is spinning at a speed of 528.5 times per second, in addition to an X-ray thermonuclear explosion.
“This detection shows that MAXI J1816-195 is a neutron star and a new X-ray pulsar in milliseconds,” the astronauts said, according to Science Alert.
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Now that the discovery is so new, there are observations at various wavelengths. Researchers are conducting observations using Neil Gehrels’ Swift Observatory. The Liverpool Telescope on the Canary Island of La Palma in Spain has also been included for further observations.