Like good pulp fiction, an American Earth-orbiting telescope last December stumbled in the dark recesses of space over a dying body.
Since then, investigators all over the world have been scrambling to be the first to actually see it–and figure out why it’s causing such celestial mayhem.
“This repeated bursting behavior from a pulsar is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before,” said Don Lamb, University of Chicago professor of astronomy and astrophysics.
Theoreticians from Chicago, NASA and a number of other observatories are weighing in with conflicting theories about what the object, now being called a “bursting pulsar,” represents. Considered one of the major astronomical “finds” of recent years, it even has one set of identical twin brothers of different minds about what it is.
The University of Chicago and its sophisticated new observatory in New Mexico, operated by remote control from the Hyde Park campus, is proving to be a major player in the space adventure.
At the center of the debate is an incredibly dense piece of matter that is about the size of the Sears Tower but weighs 10 times more than the sun, and another star that it may be ripping apart.
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“In the cosmic fabric of things,” said Lamb, “this is telling us about the death throes of stars. And, to quote Dylan Thomas, they are not going `gentle into that good night,’ they are `raging, raging against the dying of the light.’ “
The object was first detected Dec. 2 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration space telescope, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. It is near the center of the Milky Way, sending explosive but erratic bursts of X-ray and gamma ray signals, up to 18 every hour.
Lamb, one of the world’s foremost theorists on gamma ray bursts, has been trying since January to make visual contact with the object, which was also written about in the research journal Science last week.
As it turns out, the bald but boyish Lamb, 50, has an archrival theorist who has sifted through the evidence as carefully as he has and says he has quite a different theory. The rival, equally bald and boyish, happens to be Fred Lamb, Don’s identical twin brother and a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“I’ve put my money on another horse,” Fred Lamb said in last week’s Science article. He declined to talk about his theory, however, until he has his say at a NASA news conference on Wednesday. The conference is being held in conjunction with publication Tuesday of an article Fred Lamb co-authored in the research journal Nature.
Fred Lamb is one of the principal investigators for NASA of the bursting pulsar, making his observations with the Compton satellite and a new space telescope that went into orbit Dec. 29, the X-ray Timing Explorer.
Some scientists believe the discovered but still unsighted object is such an important find that it may prove to be a stellar “Rosetta stone,” explaining to science what gamma ray bursts, a great mystery of astrophysics, are all about.
It is at least, Don Lamb said, another new entry in the catalog of bizarre space objects discovered in the last 20 years as new technologies have vastly increased mankind’s ability to look into the heavens.
Lamb said he believes this object is a binary star, two stars locked in orbit around each other.
One is a neutron star that has already consumed all its fuel and is now very small. The other is about the size of our sun, Lamb said. The neutron star is gravitationally pulling great swatches of the other star’s hydrogen atmosphere down to its surface, concussing in nuclear explosions.
In trying to see the dying binary, Lamb and his team of theorists and observers have given the university’s Apache Point remote observatory one of its most vigorous tests since it opened in 1994.
The first of its kind in the world, the 140-inch telescope can be operated remotely by computers via the Internet from sites hundreds or thousands of miles away. Moreover, it can be quickly remade into different kinds of optical and infrared telescopes with components that can be switched on the instrument in less than 15 minutes.
As a result, Don Lamb and his colleagues have been able to sit in Chicago while peering via a computer screen through the telescope on a 9,200-foot mountain in New Mexico.
On several early mornings in the last two months, in the half-hour before dawn in New Mexico, the Chicago scientists have gathered in an office at the astronomy and astrophysics department on Ellis Avenue.
Typing commands into a computer here, the telescope in New Mexico responds by locking into a sliver of sky near the center of the Milky Way where the two NASA space telescopes detected the bursting pulsar.
Once it zeroes in on that region, it begins taking photographs of what it is seeing, sending them back to the computer screens in Chicago.
The Chicago group looks through the optical telescope until the horizon brightens too much from the rising sun, then quickly switches the instrument to the X-ray mode for a search in that wavelength.
He said he believes they have located the object both in infrared and visible wavelengths, but he and his group can’t be sure yet that the signals they are getting in each wavelength are coming from the same source.
The fact that they can sit in Chicago and manipulate such a powerful instrument so far away, however, is a technological coup that in itself is attracting a lot of attention in the scientific community.
“This kind of opportunity could never have taken place without this telescope,” said Donald York, another Chicago astrophysicist who designed the Apache Point telescope.
At 6 a.m. one day late in January, he sat in the Ellis Avenue control center watching Lamb’s group put the telescope through its paces. It was a morning the group was hoping to triumphantly and unambiguously spot the bursting pulsar in the visual wavelength.
Sharing the telescope with a consortium of five other universities that pay for and use the instrument, on this morning, they had only about 40 minutes viewing time. The honor of being the first to see the object is so great that Lamb, theorist Jean Quashnock, expert astronomical observer Robert Nichol and two graduate students, worked under visible strain and anticipation.
“To get these five people,” said York, “with their combination of intellectual skills, around a telescope all at once, normally is a highly unusual circumstance.
“You couldn’t even get one of them to the New Mexico site fast enough to respond to this kind of event, through all the hoops of buying airline tickets, arranging personal lives and all of that.”
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The triumph the Chicago group was searching for that morning and other, subsequent mornings has eluded them. But Don Lamb believes he and his group will ultimately win the good-natured but very real race they are in with his twin brother’s group to figure out what is going on.
“I have a sneaking suspicion that I know what Fred’s thinking, and there’s not a chance that he is right,” Lamb says, laughing. “Of course, he’s probably saying the same thing to his group right now.”