ISRO’s new findings on X-ray emissions

In an important discovery, Astrosat, the country’s multi-wavelength space telescope, has completed an extremely difficult task of measuring X-ray polarisation, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced on Monday. 

BENGALURU: In an important discovery, Astrosat, the country’s multi-wavelength space telescope, has completed an extremely difficult task of measuring X-ray polarisation, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced on Monday. The team in-charge of the Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager (CZTI), one of the satellite’s payloads, have published a paper detailing their 18-month study in the journal ‘Nature Astronomy’ released on Monday.

The measurement is expected to put up a strong challenge to the established theories of high energy X-ray emissions from pulsars, ISRO said. Crab Pulsar, a relatively young neutron star in the Crab Nebula, a remnant of the supernova SN 1054 which was discovered in the year 1054, is often used for calibration in X-ray astronomy.

Indian scientists, using the data from the CZTI, managed to capture sensitive measurements which enabled the study of polarisation at different rotation phases of the pulsar, which is 30 times a second. “The polarisation is varying the most in the ‘off-pulse’ duration when no contribution from the pulsar is expected, which poses a serious challenge to most current theories,” ISRO said in a statement.  
The ASTROSAT observatory was launched on September 28, 2015 on board ISRO’s PSLV-C30.

Related Stories

No stories found.
The New Indian Express
www.newindianexpress.com