The November speaker is Ingrid Stairs of UBC astronomy speaking on her recent pulsar discovery.
“A Brand-New (In Every Way) Millisecond Pulsar”
Pulsars generally come in two types: "young and slow" and "old and fast," with the fastest known pulsar spinning more than 700 times per second.
How does a neutron star get to spin so quickly? For a few decades, we've had a good theoretical picture of how this should happen: the pulsar gets "recycled"
as a companion star dumps matter onto it.
Over the years, astronomers have found binary systems representing various stages of this process, but had never seen a fast-spinning radio pulsar whose companion was at the end stages of transferring matter.
Such a system is exactly what we found last year when searching for new pulsars. I'll explain how we found the system and figured out what it was, and how it adds evidence for the recycling theory while opening up new questions of its own.
This is the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada - Vancouver monthly meeting and is shared with the general public at no charge.
We meet at 7:30 p.m. on the second Thursday of each month, downstairs in the auditorium of the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre.
Free Admission, Open to the public
Astro-coffee and astro-cookies will be served at the Southam Observatory after the meeting.
