Video of Neutron Stars: Crash Course Astronomy #32
FAST is so big it s sensitive to fainter pulsars than have ever been seen before. The survey scans the plane of the Milky Way to look for them high mass stars that explode as supernovae and form neutron stars tend to be pretty much right along the disk of the galaxy. We are inside the galaxy, so we see this disk as a thick line across the sky (called, confusingly, the Milky Way) and so that s the best place to look for pulsars.
Video of Animation of a spinning pulsar
It found some interesting ones, too. 40 of the new found pulsars are what we call millisecond pulsars, spinning faster than about 300 times per second.
Such is HD 140283, a star similar to the Sun that lies 200 light years from Earth pretty close as stars go. It s been known for some time to be a special kind of star, one we say is low metallicity.
metals for historical reasons) didn t start turning up until massive stars made them in their cores, exploded, and sent them sleeting out into space to get incorporated into newer stars.
What this means is that older stars tend to have fewer heavy elements in them, and younger stars have more. We use the Sun as a standard, because why not. By that measure, HD 140283 has a metallicity 1/250