Idaho Skies Transcript for February 22nd, 23rd, and 24th

PAUL
Welcome to Idaho Skies for February 22nd, 23rd, and 24th. We’re your hosts, Paul...

RACHEL
...and Rachel.

PAUL
This Sunday marks the 51st anniversary of the announcement of the pulsar in Nature, a science journal.

RACHEL
In November 1967, grad student Jocelyn Bell was monitoring the sky with a radio telescope. As radio emitting objects passes through the beam of the stationary radio telescope, their signals were recorded on a strip chart recorder. She noticed that one of the signals recorded on her instruments repeated regularly at 1.3 seconds. 

PAUL
The regularity of the signal was too perfect for any astronomical object known in 1967. For a short time, she and her advising professor named the source of the signal, LGM-1. LGM by the way stood for Little Green Men. She and her professor didn’t really think the source of the radio signal was an extraterrestrial intelligence, but the signal was a little too perfect.

RACHEL
Astronomers Baade and Zwicky had predicted the existence of dead stars smaller than white dwarfs back in 1934. These dead stars would be so dense that only their neutrons could halt further gravitational collapse. Their small size, on the order of 20 miles, would also make them spin incredibly fast. And if they emitted radiation, like radio waves, they could flash on and off several times per second with fantastic precision and regularity.     

PAUL
It was 33 years later when Bell discovered the first four of these spinning neutron stars. Today, astronomers have discovered some 2,000 neutron stars and the fastest rotates 716 times per second. That means at its equator, the neutron star is spinning at 44,700 miles per second. That’s 24% the speed of light. Even more strangely, there are four known pulsars with planets. How weird can neutron stars get?   

RACHEL
That’s Idaho Skies for the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th of February.

PAUL
Be sure to follow us on Twitter @IdahoSkies for this week’s event reminders and sky maps.

For Idaho Skies this is Paul...

RACHEL
...and Rachel.

RACHEL
Dark skies and bright stars.