Smallest speed jump of pulsar caused by billions of superfluid vortices
Thursday, April 17, 2014 - 05:20
in Physics & Chemistry
A team of astronomers, including Danai Antonopoulou and Anna Watts from the University of Amsterdam, has discovered that sudden speed jumps in the rotational velocity of pulsars have a minimum size, and that they are caused not by the unpinning and displacement of just one sub-surface superfluid vortex, but by billions. This result is important to our understanding of the behavior of matter under extreme conditions, and has been published this week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.