Video of Neutron Stars: Crash Course Astronomy #32
FAST is so big it s sensitive to fainter pulsars than have ever been seen before. The survey scans the plane of the Milky Way to look for them high mass stars that explode as supernovae and form neutron stars tend to be pretty much right along the disk of the galaxy. We are inside the galaxy, so we see this disk as a thick line across the sky (called, confusingly, the Milky Way) and so that s the best place to look for pulsars.
Video of Animation of a spinning pulsar
It found some interesting ones, too. 40 of the new found pulsars are what we call millisecond pulsars, spinning faster than about 300 times per second.
When stars die, sometimes after billions of years of creating energy and light in their cores, they can bloat up into swollen red giants, enormous and luminous objects. Silicon and carbon in their upper layers can blow out into the space around them, cooling and condensing into grains of material astronomers call
dust.
The galaxy is littered with dense clouds of dust, blocking our view of stars behind them due to their opacity. They can appear brown or black, like holes in space, dark and forbidding.
But dust also appears in clouds where stars are being born, and sometimes these infant stars are massive and blue, sending out vast amounts of energy into their birth nebula. And when they do the dust around them reflects that light, sending some of it Earthward, and we see those clouds not as voids but as lustrous, cerulean, even gossamer cosmic threads.