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A newly discovered star has astonished a team of scientists
who say that nothing at this moment can explain what is happening.
The star is called pulsar,
which is a star that appears to pulse with intense radio wave emissions.
However, the star in question switches unpredictably between radio and X-ray emissions,
leaving astronomers openly baffled.
According to lead author Wim Hermsen,
"The people creating models will have to rethink what we are discovering here...
When we look now to what is so far published in papers,
nothing at this moment can explain what is happening."
Why is this discovery so astonishing to astronomers?
Pulsars were discovered back in 1967,
they discovered that there was this string of radio pulses
with a periodicity of 1.3 seconds coming out of the constellation of Vulpecula.
So they didn't know what that was, they called it pulsars and there was a big puzzlement
and about a year later the famous astronomer Tommy Gold
postulated that the reason that these pulses were being created
is that there was a rapidly rotating star
acting very much like a lighthouse rotating a light beam
and as it passed in the direction of Earth, we'd see this blink,
we could see this emission of radio waves
and then it would go off for a while
while this star swung the rest of the way around those 360º
and then blink, it would come back again 1.3 seconds later.
And Gold was the one who postulated that that star must be a rotating neutron star
because the darn thing was spinning around so quickly,
imagine a star spinning and making it once around in 1.3 seconds.
Now they've discovered this one, it has two different modes of operation.
For a while it throws off pulses of X-rays and then changes its mind
and then throws off pulses of high-frequency radio
at very very different frequencies in a very very different mechanism.
And so, they don't want to hear about two different mechanisms
because there's only one mechanism, the rotating 'whatsis' is up there.
The lighthouse analogy for the pulsars' flashes is attractively simple
but because the flashes themselves are so complex
there's been no way of explaining them currently.
Now it is, when you look at it from an electrical point of view,
the pulsar flashes have more in common with the complex radio signals
induced in the ionosphere of the Earth by powerful lightning
and this may be the key to this particular pulsar
because lightning can also generate X-rays.
Astronomers suggest that the pulsar's varying between radio wave and X-ray emissions
may be caused by changes in the star's magnetosphere.
This suggestion brings them closer to the electrical theorists' interpretation.
I just looked up a copy of Healy and Peratt's paper,
their paper on pulsars back in 1995, it was called
'Radiation Properties of Pulsar Magnetospheres: Observation, Theory and Experiment'.
Healy was at the VLA, the Very Large Array of national radio astronomy
in Socorro, New Mexico
and Peratt, of course, was at Los Alamos Lab
and they did a very in-depth study of all of the known properties of pulsars.
If you stop and think about Healy and Peratt's ideas,
if this is an electrical oscillation, there are all sorts of circuits that man uses now
and (that) have been developed in electrical engineering laboratories, that put out
different signals at different frequencies and switch back and forth
between one mode of operation and another mode of operation.
So it's (a) strong strong strong suggestion that what we are observing
is an electrical oscillation that has a couple of different modes of operation.
We see it in the lab everyday.
The Healy and Peratt model of the pulsing signals from a star
doesn't require a rotating object or the lighthouse effect.
What it says in effect is that there is a discharge that occurs close to the star
which then travels along the magnetic field lines
outwards from the star where it meets a disk of matter surrounding the star.
Where it meets that more dense matter disk,
there is a kind of short circuit (that) occurs and the signal is reflected.
It's just like a transmission line in electrical engineering theory.
And in fact, the signal does reverse phase which is what you'd expect in that condition.
So in other words, it's a kind of confirmation of their model, if you like.
Now this particular pulsar is switching between radio,
strong radio signals and strong X-ray signals, for reasons that are unknown.
It suggests to me that where the short circuit occurs in this signal regime,
in a less dense atmosphere you're getting radio signals,
radio pulses. In a more dense atmosphere
it forms more like a lightning discharge and X-rays are being generated.
So that would be my view of this particular pulsar.
What Healy and Peratt have done is to provide a model
which is amenable to experiment and to verification on Earth in the laboratory;
as distinct from a model which invokes an unknown form of matter,
a neutron star,
and an object rotating faster than a dentist's drill in some cases.
It seems to me that until we get the concepts right,
we will never get a correct answer.
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