The timescales over which our universe changes are often vast and beyond what humans have been around long enough to witness. Galaxy collisions: billions of years. Star formation: hundreds of thousands of years. Humans: just not that long.

Sometimes, though, we get lucky. In 1054, a massive star in our galaxy exploded, forming a nebula and a pulsar. Today, we call this the Crab Nebula and the Crab Pulsar, and this system is one humans have gotten to watch across its entire evolution with increasing technological awesomeness. Today, this young system is giving us new insights into the energies pulsars are capable of throwing off.

These Manhattan Island-sized stars spin at hundreds to thousands of cycles a second, and while most of the time these dense neutron stars give off a steady stream of radio pulses, sometimes, instead of study pulses, they just throw out a giant radio pulse. In new research published in the journal Science, researchers led by Teruaki Enoto discuss how they looked at the Crab Pulsar simultaneously in radio and X-ray to see if these periodical giant radio pulses are tied to activity in other wavelengths of light.

And they are.

The Crab Nebula is always giving off some X-rays, but they observed that during the short-lived giant radio pulses, these X-rays increase somewhat. While this “increase somewhat” is cool but not entirely exciting on its own, the combined results of massive increases in radio brightness and minor increases in X-ray mean that the dead star increases tens to hundreds of times in total emitted energy during these events. This is significantly more – tens to hundreds of times more – energy than previously thought. These bursts are likely related to fast radio bursts that are coming from some not well-known source in galaxies too far away to resolve, and if we can better understand how the Crab Pulsar is misbehaving maybe we can figure out what is misbehaving on the other side of the visible universe.

More Information

NASA press release

RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research press release

“Enhanced x-ray emission coinciding with giant radio pulses from the Crab Pulsar,” Teruaki Enoto et al., 2021 April 9, Science