A new explanation for the way a pulsar spins has been discovered. To make this finding, a scientist-team used the Oak Ridge National Laboratory supercomputers. The scientists performed three-dimensional simulations at the Leadership Computing Facility, located at ORNL.
According to it, a pulsar’s spin is determined not by the spin of the original star, but by the shock wave that is created during the collapse of the massive iron core of the star.
Anthony Mezzacappa of the Department of Energy lab’s Physics Division said,
The stuff that’s falling in toward the center, if it hits this shock wave that is not a sphere any more but a cigar-shaped surface, will be deflected. When you do this in 3-D, you find that you wind up with not only one flow, but two counterrotating flows.
The work was funded through Advanced Computing, or SciDAC, program, under the DOE Office of Science’s Scientific Discovery. These findings are published in the Jan. 4 issue of the journal Nature.
