/vt/ - Virtual Youtubers

One of the big features of the sky is Pulsars. These are immensely powerful "lighthouses in space" that send out a regular signal. These signals are incredibly fast, with a period from 10 seconds to 1 millisecond, and shining from ludicrously far away.

The only thing we can imagine is that these signals are ejecta, streams of radiation being sent out of a rapidly spinning body. Perhaps a star with the magnetic field slightly off the axis of spin, so that it sends out a stream of radiation in a circular pattern with every single rotation. Because these signals are so fast, these are probably super compressed stars that have taken up an incredible rate of spin. Neutron stars, or white dwarfs.

A white dwarf is basically the core of a massive star that exploded. And a neutron star is a super compressed state of matter, so compressed that all the protons and electrons have degenerated into pure neutrons. You know how 99% of an atom is empty space? Not so with neutron material, in which the fundamental particles are all packed together, thus unimaginably dense. When an object contracts its radius, the rate of spin increases. These incredibly dense star-remnants have probably greatly accelerated their rate of spin, and thus send out incredibly powerful signals that we can detect on earth. This is the probable explanation for pulsars.

Some people also think the accretion disk around a black hole will spiral up around the magnetic field lines and be ejected out the top, like a lighthouse.