Assam researcher discovers rare stars, study to be published at The Astrophysical Journal

Assam, Nov 29: A team of scientists led by Assam researcher Barnali Das and her supervisor Poonam Chandra has discovered eight ‘exotic’ radio rare stars that are hotter than the Sun and have unusually strong magnetic fields.

Barnali and her team at the Pune-based National Centre For Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) had used the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) to discover the eight stars that belong to a rare category called ‘Main-sequence Radio Pulse’ emitters or MRPs.

Their research will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The first MRP was spotted in 2000. The NCRA team has said that they had discovered three such stars in the past using the GMRT. Of the total 15 MRPs known so far, 11 have been discovered by the NCRA team alone.


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According to the statement, the pulsed radio emission from MRPs is the only visible sign of theoretical models that anticipate minor explosions in magnetic massive stars that occur at specified regions in the star’s magnetosphere.

Assam’s Bajali district’s Das, told reporters, “Our research aim was to find stars much hotter than the sun. These stars look blue. They are of more than ten thousand kelvin heat. Some of them have strong magnetic fields and they can react in a certain way in a specific atmosphere. The first MRP was discovered in 2000 and after that, there was a notion that these stars are hard to spot.”