ESA X-ray Observatory: Super-dense star is first ever found suddenly slowing its spin

The magnetar 1E 2259+586 shines a brilliant blue-white in this false-colour X-ray image of the CTB 109 supernova remnant, which lies about 10,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia. 

CTB 109 is only one of three supernova remnants in our galaxy known to harbor a magnetar. 

X-rays at low, medium and high energies are respectively shown in red, green, and blue in this image created from observations acquired by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite in 2002. 

Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton /M. Sasaki et al.

One of the densest objects in the universe, a neutron star about 10,000 light years from Earth, has been discovered suddenly putting the brakes on its spinning speed.

The event is a mystery that holds important clues for understanding how matter reacts when it is squeezed more tightly than the density of an atomic nucleus—a state that no laboratory on Earth has achieved.

The discovery by an international team of scientists will be published in the journal Nature on May 30, 2013.

The scientists detected the neutron star's abrupt slow-down with NASA's Swift observatory, a satellite with three telescopes whose science and flight operations are controlled by Penn State from the Mission Operations Center on the University Park campus.

"Because Swift has the ability to regularly measure the spin of this unusual star, we have been able to observe its surprising evolution," said Penn State astronomer Jamie Kennea, a coauthor of the Nature paper.

"This neutron star is doing something completely unexpected. Its speed of rotation has been dropping at an increasingly rapid rate ever since the initial sudden decrease in its spin."

Although astronomers have observed neutron stars suddenly speeding up their spins—an event called a "glitch"—they never before had observed a neutron star suddenly slowing down.

"We've dubbed this event an 'anti-glitch' because it affected this star in exactly the opposite manner of every other clearly identified glitch seen in neutron stars," said co-author Neil Gehrels, the lead researcher on the Swift mission, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

The star is in the Northern Hemisphere sky in the constellation Cassiopeia.

More Information: Nature, 2013. dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12159