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Pulsars shoot beams out of their magnetic poles so they are directed but in a beam. Even the narrowest would be lots of stars. They are also spinning so they sw
by ianburrell 1y ago
Pulsars shoot beams out of their magnetic poles so they are directed but in a beam. Even the narrowest would be lots of stars. They are also spinning so they sweep a larger area.
- somat 1y agoMy natural first question is. If it is coming out of the pole, why is it sweeping? My guess, nothing is perfect, the rotation pole does not align exactly with the magnetic pole. A second followup question, do stars tend to be coaxially aligned with their galaxy? it it possible to tell which way a star or pulsar is rotating?
- dumah 1y agoThis is called the pulsar’s magnetic inclination and it’s often quite far from 0, all the way to nearly orthogonal. Yes but this is a dynamic process that produces more correlated stars as the galaxy ages. Astronomers routinely measure such parameters using models to provide confidence bounds for their estimates. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.13857 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.13857