Astronomers have discovered 15 new pulsars in a globular cluster near Earth

With the help of the MeerKAT radio telescope, a team of astronomers has recently discovered 15 new millisecond pulsars. And these stars are located about 13,000 light-years from Earth, in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae.

As a reminder, pulsars are neutron stars with a diameter of about 20 kilometers and a mass of about 1.5 times that of the Sun. As a result, these stars are extremely dense and rotate at high speeds.

Thus, a team of astronomers led by Weiwei Chen of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany, has recently announced the discovery of 15 millisecond pulsars, also known as MSPs. Their spin periods are very short, ranging from 1.88 to 13.03 milliseconds. And that’s not all, because 12 of them are binary pulsars with low mass companions, while the others are isolated pulsars.

Therefore, thanks to these new discoveries, there are now 42 confirmed pulsars in 47 Tucanae. But astronomers will need to conduct further studies to better understand them and try to discover new similar stars. However, although these pulsars are impressive, the fastest one ever discovered is PSR J1748-2446ad, a pulsar located about 18,000 light-years from Earth, which spins 716 times per second.