So, most of my current research is on pulsars and pulsar accessories. Part of me wants to go "ok everyone knows what a pulsar is so let's go straight to talking about the advanced stuff" and then i remember that one xkcd comic about experts so:
Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars with bright βbeamsβ of radiation that sweep across the sky. When these beams happen to cross over Earth, we detect a βpulseβ, much like a lighthouse appears to pulse as it sweeps across a given vantage point.
ok wait we should probably talk about neutron stars first,
so stars are, by and large, big balls of hydrogen plasma. gravity wants to squish them down very very small, but when you squeeze things they get hot and hot hydrogen fuses with other hot hydrogen to make REALLY hot helium. hot things generate a lot of pressure, and a lot of light, and the light also generates a bit of pressure. eventually gravity and the fusion heat pressure balance out and you've got this remarkably stable plasma orb
but eventually the hydrogen runs out, and if the star had enough mass there's helium flash asymptotic giant branch shell burning etc etc eventually it explodes in a supernova
the supernova ends up leaving something behind, depending on how massive the progenitor star was. everyone knows black holes, which is the supernova remnant from the really big fuckers, but smaller (but still big) stars end up leaving behind a neutron star
what happens is the supernova is the outer layers of the star. the iron core is mostly intact but still VERY massive and iron doesn't fuse (long story involving nucleon binding energies) so you don't end up getting the heat to balance gravity and gravity gets VERY excited about this. the iron atoms get squished so hard that the electrons get shoved into the protons and turn into neutrons
so, a neutron star is just a ball of neutrons held up from gravity purely based on the fact that neutrons REALLY don't want to exist in the same space as other neutrons.
and now we can talk about pulsars properly. you know how when you stick your arms out and spin in an office chair and then pull your arms in you spin faster?
magnetic fields don't really do that, but it's close enough that it works as a good analogy. the progenitor star's magnetic field got REALLY strong after the whole supernova + core collapse + L + ratio incident
earth's magnetic field is offset from the rotation axis, right? the north pole is not the same as the north magnetic pole? this happens with neutron stars too
and through some mechanism we don't really understand, the magnetic field forms two beams of radiation, one at each pole. since they're not aligned with the rotation axis, they end up sweeping across the sky as the neutron star itself spins. they're big ol' lighthouses in space
+SHELLBURNING +IRONFUSION +CORECOLLAPSE +SUPERNOVA +SYNCHROTRON +JANSKIED
