First millisecond pulsar PSR J0125-5854 found with the Murchison Widefield Array in SMART survey
Astronomers found the first millisecond pulsar ever detected by the Murchison Widefield Array, a low-frequency radio telescope in outback Australia. PSR J0125-5854 spins every 24.6 milliseconds and orbits a companion star on a 290-day cycle. It proves the array can hunt these rar
Astronomers have detected the first millisecond pulsar ever found with the Murchison Widefield Array, a low-frequency radio telescope spread across a remote stretch of Western Australia. The discovery came out of the Southern-sky MWA Rapid Two-metre survey, or SMART, a long-running effort to map the southern sky for these elusive objects. A millisecond pulsar is the collapsed core of a dead star, packed denser than an atomic nucleus, that sweeps a beam of radio waves past Earth like a lighthouse as it spins. This one, catalogued as PSR J0125-5854, completes a rotation every 24.6 milliseconds, roughly 40 times a second. Follow-up observations with the MWA and the more sensitive MeerKAT array in South Africa showed it is locked in a binary system, orbiting a companion star on a cycle longer than 290 days. The reason this is more than a routine catalogue entry: the overwhelming majority of millisecond pulsars have been found at higher radio frequencies, where their signals are easier to pick out. Finding one at the MWA's low frequencies shows the instrument can contribute to a search that feeds into some of the most precise physics experiments in astronomy, including efforts to detect gravitational waves rippling through the galaxy. The work was posted to the arXiv preprint server and has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Source: research paper via arXiv and Phys.org reporting.