How many revolutions does your average neutron star make per second???

Question

If possible what are some of slowest rotators and some of the fastest...Thanks for the detail...

Answer 1

I found a catalogue of 706 pulsars on SIMBAD (see link in sources), sucked them into a spreadsheet.

The slowest I found had a period of 5.09 seconds (PSR 1951 +1123) and the fastest 0.0016 seconds (1939 +2134) (600 rotations/sec). The median value was 0.558 seconds.

Tomorrow, when I have something besides this dog of a Java spreadsheet, I'll make some histograms and see what the distribution looks like. I am hoping if I take the log of the period or more likely the log of the frequency, I'll get some nice gaussian distribution of angular momentums, perhaps two populations separating the spun up ones from the others.

Answer 2

2

Answer 3

Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of some massive stars. They pack roughly the mass of our Sun into a region the size of a city.

Neutron stars rotate very rapidly, up to 600 times per second. They may be born rotating very fast, with periods comparable to a millisecond (although evidence is ambiguous). After that, they spin down ever after because of magnetic torques. This seems to be supported by the fact that some of the youngest pulsars, such as the Crab pulsar (33 ms) and the Vela pulsar (80 ms) have unusually short periods. After a pulsar is born, its magnetic field will exert a torque and slow it down, with typical spindown rates of 10^-13 s/s for a young pulsar like the Crab.

Although overall the tendency is for isolated pulsars to slow down, they can undergo very brief periods of spinup. These events are called "glitches", and they can momentarily change the period of a pulsar by up to a few parts in a million. The effects of glitches decay away in a few days, and then the pulsar resumes its normal spindown.

Answer 4

400 avg; 100 on the lower end; 1000 on the higher side