ALMA and Other Telescopes Help Unravel Pulsar Puzzle

With a remarkable observational campaign that involved 12 telescopes both on the ground and in space, including ALMA, astronomers have uncovered the strange behavior of a pulsar, a super-fast-spinning dead star. This mysterious object is known to switch between two brightness modes almost constantly, which has been an enigma until now. However, astronomers have found that sudden ejections of matter from the pulsar over very short periods are responsible for the peculiar switches.

What is ALMA Astronomy News?

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) -the largest astronomical project in existence- is a single telescope of revolutionary design, composed of 66 high precision antennas located in northern Chile. ALMA is an international partnership of ESO (Europe), NSF (U.S) and NINS (Japan) together with NRC (Canada), MOST and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile We love the Cosmos!