3 ms·
Might it be caused by something as mundane as an inclined axis wrt Earth/Sol? IIRC some celestial bodies do not radiate uniformly in all directions, but only fr
by tremon 3y ago
Might it be caused by something as mundane as an inclined axis wrt Earth/Sol? IIRC some celestial bodies do not radiate uniformly in all directions, but only from the poles. If its normal rotation would keep the beams away from us, but there is a slight wobble in its inclination, that would mean that both the burst frequency and the wobble frequency could be faster than 1/22 minutes, and we're seeing only the product of those periods from here.
- Enginerrrd 3y agoI don't think so, it is my understanding that's basically how pulsars already work. I'm curious about a binary system though. Could it, through tidal locking have the stability to produce the longer duration signal?
- trolan 3y agoThe article covers that. The only known versions do not fit the physics, time scale or amount of energy observed.
- tremon 3y agoHuh, somehow I glossed over the part where a regular neutron star would have bursts from <1s to 60s, while this body has bursts between 30 and 300 seconds. So it's still a different phenomenon than known pulsars. But I don't think it covers the core of what I meant to suggest/ask: if the object is spinning around 2 axes (for whatever reason) rather than one, that could still be an explanation why the observed periodicity from Earth does not match what we expect its actual rotation period to be.