In a celestial breakthrough, a team of scientists in the UK and South Africa has stumbled on a first-of-its-kind ‘White Dwarf Pulsar,’ holding the mass close to Earth. The White Dwarf Pulsar, located nearly 380 light years away from earth is mimicking the secretions of a neutron star. Named as AR Scorpii (AR Sco), the collapsed star is a huge dynamo – a magnet that is rotating in every two minutes.
The white dwarf pulsar has kept on eluding astronomers for more than half a century. A team of researchers, including those from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, have identified the star AR Scorpii (AR Sco) which is the first white dwarf console of a pulsar – celestial bodies found in the late of 1960 and connected with distinct objects known as neutron stars. According to the researchers, they have been searching for such an object since more than 50 years, and the recently discovered one is the first white dwarf pulsar ever detected.
The star – AR Sco is residing in the constellation Scorpius, nearly 380 light-years far from the rim of Earth. In astronomical terms, it is one of the closest neighbors of the earth. The size of the star is close to the mass of earth. As per the official report, the size of the white dwarf in AR Sco is equal to earth, but it is 200,000 times more massive than of earth and one-third of Sun’s mass. It has a 3.6 hour orbiter period with a cool star.
The star also has a super-powerful electromagnetic field which is 100 million times more powerful than the electromagnet field of Earth. It is spinning in every two minutes. AR Sco also emits lighthouse-like focused beams of waves and particles, which knot across the front of the cool star, which is a red dwarf.
In 1967, Pulsars were discovered by Jocelyn Bell and Antony Hewish, and since then, pulsars, being unique and exotic objects have been intriguing astronomers. To summon up, the pulsar is a sort of neutron star which frequently spins and gives out intense and focused radiation waves from its poles. But in the discovery, astronomers have found a first-of-its-kind pulsar which is not a neutron star by any means. Rather, it is a white dwarf which is spinning in every two minutes.