Pulsars - Overview
Pulsars
Pulsars (aka neutron stars) are the rigid, dense stellar remnants left over after a star over around 8 solar masses goes supernova.
These objects spin incredibly quickly as a result of angular momentum being conserved as they go from the radius of the sun to just a few kms. Sometimes their frequencies can reach up to 100x a second, corresponding to a speed at the crust of ~10% of the speed of light. These millisecond pulsars achieve these frequencies during their lifetimes as they are sped up “recycled” by processes such as accretion.
A pulsar’s rapid rotation also causes the emission of EM radiation from their poles which, when seen from Earth, appear like pulses similar to a lighthouse.
As they are so incredibly small, often these pulses are all we can detect from them and as such, there is still a lot we don’t know about their interiors or equation of state.
