A new millisecond pulsar has been discovered in the globular cluster NGC 6652, according to an international team of scientists. PSR J18353259B was given to the newly discovered pulsar. The study outlining the discovery and disclosure of this object’s fundamental properties was released on the arXiv pre-print service on May 30.
Pulsars are rotating neutron stars with a strong magnetic field that release a beam of electromagnetic radiation. Millisecond pulsars are the fastest rotating pulsars, with rotation times of less than 30 milliseconds (MSPs). They are thought to develop in binary systems when the more massive component transforms into a neutron star, which is subsequently spun up by matter accretion from the secondary star.
As part of the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) survey, a team of astronomers led by Tasha Gautam of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, discovered another MSP. They discovered NGC 6652 hosts a rapidly rotating pulsar during radio surveys of eight GCs at 400 MHz and 650 MHz with the uGMRT’s new GMRT Wideband Backend (GWB) equipment.
“The results of a GC pulsar scan using uGMRT’s new wide-bandwidth receivers to look for steep-spectrum pulsars at 400 MHz and 650 MHz were given in this study. We found eight GCs and used segmented and full-length acceleration and jerk search strategies to look for single and binary pulsar systems in each cluster. In NGC 6652, we discovered a new MSP binary, J18353259B “, according to the researchers.
uGMRT found the first pulsar, PSR J18353259B. It has a spin period of 1.83 milliseconds, an orbital period of about 1.2 days, and a dispersion value of 63.5 pc/cm3. PSR J18353259B is a broad orbit binary system with a small eccentricity, according to the findings. The researchers believe that this MSP has a typical age of at least 430 million years and a surface magnetic field intensity of less than 350 million Gauss.
According to the research, the companion object in PSR J18353259B has a median mass of 0.21 solar masses, assuming the pulsar mass is 1.4 solar masses. The astronomers believe the companion is a helium white dwarf since the data match those of MSP systems that contain such objects.
In addition to detecting PSR J18353259B, Gautam’s team calculated the flux density and spectral indices of all pulsars in the eight GCs they studied. PSR J18353259B was discovered to be the brightest of all the pulsars in these clusters. In addition, the scientists discovered three radio emitters in NGC 6652 that were not related to any known pulsars. In order to decipher their nature, more observations are required.
