Radiation Emitting Pulsar in Far Space Spins Out of View, To Emerge 160 Years Later

A fast spinning pulsar which beamed its 'light' across to Earth for the past five years has suddenly disappeared in space-time.

According to BBC, researchers tracked the pulsar with the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico every night and determined several parameters including the pulsar's gravitational interaction with another massive star which it was orbiting. The radiation emitted by the pulsar named J1906 was beam across earth making detection possible.

"Our result is important because weighing stars while they freely float through space is exceedingly difficult. That is a problem because such mass measurements are required for precisely understanding gravity, the force that is intimately linked to the behavior of space and time on all scales in our Universe," said Joeri van Leeuwen, the study's lead author in a news release.

"These two stars each weigh more than the Sun, but are still over 100 times closer together than the Earth is to the Sun. The resulting extreme gravity causes many remarkable effects," said Ingrid Stairs, the study's co-author.

Recently, the radiation from the pulsar suddenly went invisible.

"The pulsar is fading fast due to geodetic precession, limiting future timing improvements," researchers wrote in The Astrophysical Journal.

J1906 sudden disappearance is being attributed to space-time warp created by its companion star, likely a neutron star, in the former's orbit. The warp is a well like curvature of space and time that causing the pulsar to wobble as traverses orbit around its companion. This wobbling is termed geodetic precession. Researchers expect J1906 to reappear visible after 160 years in 2170.