High School Students Discover Pulsar With Widest-Known Orbit

Science 2.0 reports that A team of high school students analyzed data from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and discovered a never-before-seen pulsar which has the widest orbit of any around a neutron star - one among only a handful of double neutron star systems. ... This pulsar, which received the official designation PSR J1930-1852, was discovered in 2012 by Cecilia McGough, who was a student at Strasburg High School in Virginia at the time, and De'Shang Ray, who was a student at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Baltimore, Maryland. These students were participating in a summer Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC) workshop, which is an NSF-funded educational outreach program that involves interested high school students in analyzing pulsar survey data collected by the GBT. Students often spend weeks and months poring over data plots, searching for the unique signature that identifies a pulsar. Those who identify strong pulsar candidates are invited to Green Bank to work with astronomers to confirm their discovery.

Comments

Orbital Path

[Crash24]

Because it's not in the summary and buried at the bottom of the article:

The orbital path of J1930-1852 spans about 52 million kilometers, roughly the distance between Mercury and the Sun and it orbits its companion once every 45 days.

Sooo...

[Gription]

Sp you're saying that AC lamers that come out for "First posts" are enabled by their technically savvy parents?
I really fail to see any possible connection, or why that would be germane to the subject of the original article.

Get me one with a really short period!

[SharpFang]

I'd really love to see the discovery of a Quark Star.

Black Holes have two modes of creation.

One - observed and well-documented, Supernova explosion, with the core collapsing directly into a black hole.

The other is only known in theory. A neutron star obtaining enough mass through accretion to collapse either from interstellar gas or by connecting with another star (possibly also neutron). Before that happens though, there is a phase hypothesized between the neutron star and the black hole, where the matter degenerates enough that the neutron structure collapses and the star is composed of unstructured quarks. A little more and it collapses into a Black Hole.

No such star has been observed, and we don't know what other effects accompany it. The mass window is very narrow, somewhere between 3 and 4 solar masses, but the exact boundaries are not known. Dual systems with neutron stars of very short period are the candidates for this to happen. Hulse-Taylor binary binary will merge within next 300mln years, but I really hope we can observe one within our lifetimes.