Earth has been hit by a blast of energy from a dead star so powerful that scientists can’t fully explain it.
The intense gamma rays – detected using a huge system of telescopes in Namibia – would make people hiss to a crisp if we were exposed to them.
They come from the Vela Pulsar located about 1000 light years from Earth, which has already been compared in appearance to the mask from the Phantom of the Opera.
Pulsars are the remains of a massive star that blew up as a supernova an estimated 10,000 years ago and then collapsed on itself.
British astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to discover a pulsar in 1967, but this study marks the highest energy radiation from a pulsar yet observed.
The Vela Pulsar is located about 1,000 light-years from Earth in the southern sky in the constellation Vela
Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean aliens are trying to contact us, according to study author Arache Djannati-Atai of the Astroarticle & Cosmology (APC) laboratory in France.
‘It’s true that when they were first discovered in 1967, the sources were called LGM1 and LGM2 for little green men, but that was almost a joke,’ he told MailOnline.
“We know for a fact that pulsars are corpses of massive stars and that no extraterrestrial intelligence is needed to produce the signals we see on Earth.”
Pulsars are described as remnants of stars that have exploded spectacularly in a supernova, the largest explosion to occur in space.
These pulsars emit rotating beams of electromagnetic radiation, a bit like cosmic lighthouses.
As their beam moves through our solar system, we see flashes of radiation at regular time intervals.
These flashes, also called radiation pulses, can be found in different energy bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.
“These dead stars are composed almost entirely of neutrons and are incredibly compact,” says HESS scientist and study author Emma de Oña Wilhelmi.
The Vela Pulsar makes more than 11 full rotations every second, faster than a helicopter rotor. As the pulsar spins, it spits out a jet of charged particles that rush outward along the pulsar’s axis of rotation at about 70 percent of the speed of light (artist’s impression)
The observations were made using the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) telescope observatory in Namibia (photo).
“A teaspoon of their material has a mass of over five billion tons, or about 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza.”
One specific pulsar that has long been of interest to scientists is the Vela Pulsar, located about 1,000 light-years in the southern sky in the constellation Vela.
Vela Pulsar is only about 20 kilometers in diameter and makes more than 11 full rotations per second, faster than a helicopter’s rotor.
As Vela Pulsar spins, it spits out a jet of charged particles that rush outward along the pulsar’s axis of rotation at about 70 percent of the speed of light.
Using the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) telescope observatory in Namibia, the scientists studied gamma rays – which have the smallest wavelengths but the most energy of all waves in the electromagnetic spectrum – emitted by the Vela Pulsar.
The energy of this gamma ray was 20 teraelectron volts, or about 10 trillion times the energy of visible light.
This is an order of magnitude larger than in the case of the Crab pulsar, the only other pulsar detected in the tera-electronvolt energy range.
Scientists believe that the source of this radiation may be fast electrons produced and accelerated in the pulsar’s magnetosphere – the system of magnetic fields.
Like planets, including Earth, pulsars have a magnetosphere, an invisible force field that sends particles outward past the two magnetic poles.
The magnetosphere consists of plasma and electromagnetic fields that surround and rotate with the star.
The energy of this gamma ray was 20 teraelectron volts, or about 10 trillion times the energy of visible light (photo)
Pulsars have a magnetosphere, an invisible force field that sends particles outward past the two magnetic poles (photo)
According to the study authors, the Vela Pulsar now officially holds the record as the pulsar with the highest energy gamma rays discovered so far, which could revise existing astronomy models.
‘This discovery is important because we have made significant progress in investigating pulsars at their extreme energy limits,’ Djannati-Atai told MailOnline.
‘Within the zoo of cosmic beasts, pulsars are fantastic objects indeed – like neutron stars, they are extremely dense states of matter and have very intense magnetic fields.
‘Examining their energy limits of the phenomena taking place in pulsars and their environments helps us improve or even revise our theoretical models of the processes and physical conditions there.
‘It also provides a better understanding of other very dense and strongly magnetized objects that act as cosmic accelerators, for example the magnetospheres of black holes.’
The new study has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.