„I’ve been warned not to call them planets, not to call them dark matter.”
Overall effect
For years, astronomers have used the very steady flashes of light emitted from pulsars, the highly magnetized remnants of dead stars that spin like cosmic beacons, to keep atomic-scale time and monitor gravitational waves.
But there are fleeting moments when these very regular pulses are not on time. as IFL Science reportsResearchers now suggest that huge invisible masses pass in front of pulsars, causing barely perceptible delays in signals at the microsecond level.
What exactly these masses are – or whether they exist – remains a hotly debated topic.
„Don’t call them planets, don’t call them dark matter, call them mass concentrations, because you can’t tell what they are by looking at the radio,” said University of Notre Dame professor John Lozecko. He studied the phenomenon and presented his findings at this week’s National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Hull. IFL Science. „They could be a brown dwarf [star] Or something like a white dwarf or something.”
Quick Shadows
Losechko and his colleagues are using arrival time data from seven radio telescopes spread around the world to compile a catalog of these mysterious masses.
„There were 12 candidates, who came from eight independent pulsars,” he said IFL Science.
The research could also shed light on dark matter, the hypothetical stuff scientists believe makes up 85 percent of the total matter in the universe but has yet to be directly observed.
„We’re taking advantage of the fact that the Earth is moving, the Sun is moving, the pulsar is moving, and even dark matter is moving,” Lozeko explained. Press release. „We observe deviations in arrival time caused by changes in the distance between the mass we observe and the line of sight to our 'clock’ pulsar.”
One of these invisible masses measures only about one-fifth the mass of the Sun, which „could be a candidate for dark matter,” Lozeko argued.
But much more research needs to be done before we can say for sure what accounts for these minute anomalies in the cosmic beats of pulsars.
„The true nature of dark matter is a mystery,” Lozeko admitted. „This research sheds new light on the nature of dark matter and its distribution in the Milky Way and may improve the accuracy of accurate pulsar data.”
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