ASTRONOMERS have found a pulsar whose beat is so slow that, in theory, it
shouldn’t be generating a radio signal at all.
Radio pulsars are spinning neutron stars that emit radio beams from areas
near their magnetic poles, so astronomers see a pulse every time the beam sweeps
across the Earth. But the 8.5-second period of pulsar J2144-3933 is too slow to
generate a strong enough electric field to produce radio waves, according to
Matthew Young of the University of Western Australia in Nedlands (
Nature, vol 400, p 848).
Instead, Young suggests it may represent a previously unknown type of pulsar
that could be as abundant as the others in our galaxy.
