This artist’s impression depicts how nuclear explosions on a neutron star feed the jets blasting off from its magnetic polar regions. Credit: Danielle Futselaar and Nathalie Degenaar, Anton Pannekoek Institute, University of Amsterdam
However, an international team of astronomers including Thomas Russell, National Institute for Astrophysics, INAF, Palermo, Italy, realized that certain types of neutron stars might be open to a new avenue of investigation. The team reasoned that this sudden liberation of matter and energy from the surface of the neutron star would affect the jet, and that they could measure this disturbance as it propagated outwards. If so, it would provide a powerful new method for studying these violent and energetic events. We currently know of around 125 neutron stars that behave in this way.
“These bursts reoccur every couple of hours, but you can’t predict exactly when they will happen. So, you have to stare at the system for a long time with the telescopes, and hope you catch a couple of bursts,” says team member Jakob van den Eijnden,’s Australia Telescope Compact Array , logging a total of around 30 hours of observing time between 3–5 April 2021. Integral observed from space. It was the only high-energy mission capable of maintaining this long vigil.
“Never before have we been able to anticipate and directly watch how a certain amount of gas got channeled into a jet and accelerated into space,” says team member Erik Kuulkers, ESA project scientist.Having now proved that this is possible, the technique will allow astronomers to study many more X-ray bursting neutron stars.