APOD 3.8

Solar Flare in the Gamma-ray Sky
2012 March 15
Chapters 21 and 22 of our textbooks deals with extrasolar objects identified by gamma radiation from space: pulsars, black holes, and supernova remnants; however, on March sixth and seventh the sun's solar energy soared and dominated our gamma readings. Gamma rays are the highest energy form of light therefore a gamma ray sky will look drastically different than what we perceive in the visible light spectrum. At one hundred times brighter than the Vela Pulsar, an object that is consistently the brightest source of gamma rays in the sky, a X-class solar flare was captured by the Fermi Space Telescope. Telescopes such as these examine the highest wavelengths: radio, X-ray, and Gamma; additionally, X-class flare are the most massive class of solar flare possible. Below is the imaged captured by the Fermi Space Telescope.

While we know so much about the sun due to its close proximity and its radiation of light across all spectrums; pulsars are harder to study for the exact opposite reasons, they are far and faint. Another contributing factor is the way pulsars spin, if the beam of emission is  not pointed towards Earth we cannot detect it's gamma rays. What is most interesting is the rate at which their neutron stars, located at the center of the pulsar, rotate. One the size of Manhattan can rotate hundreds of times in a second. The fastest recorded rotation rate of a pulsar is 736 rotations per second. Numbers like that... are dizzying.