Fermi telescope detects youngest millisecond pulsar ever

BBC : Astronomers using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have spotted the youngest and brightest millisecond pulsar ever. Located about 27 000 light-years away in the Sagittarius constellation, the pulsar lies within a globular cluster, a dense spherical field of hundreds of thousands of old stars held together by gravity, writes Jason Palmer for the BBC. Because of the amount of light given off by the cluster, the single pulsar had to be very bright to be seen, which is unusual as pulsars tend to be very weak. This one was shining in the highest-energy light we know of: gamma rays. The researchers predict a short lifetime for J1823−3021A, however, as it is spinning down quickly—meaning the pauses between its beam pulses are growing longer and longer. Because this is the first gamma-ray pulsar that scientists have seen, it’s not yet known whether they are rare or whether their detection simply awaited the right equipment—gamma-ray telescopes. The Fermi collaboration published its results online yesterday in Science.