MOSCOW, July 26 Russian scientists have discovered a neutron star one and a half times heavier than the one found in the Spektr-RG space observatory using the ART-XC telescope installed on the Spektr-RG space observatory. The Sun, rotating at a frequency of hundreds of revolutions per second, was reported on Friday by the deputy director of the Space Research Institute (IKI) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, scientific director of the Pavlinsky ART-XC telescope, Alexander Lutovinov.
«We unexpectedly discovered an object in the sky that for some reason was missed by other observatories… this object turned out to be a neutron star that rotates with a period of 2.2 milliseconds,» Lutovinov said at an event dedicated to the fifth anniversary of the Spektr-RG space observatory.
«Imagine that you have an object with one and a half solar masses, the size of the third transport ring, terribly heavy, and it rotates not like a washing machine — 600 revolutions per minute, but 600 revolutions per second!» he added.
As Lutovinov specified, Russian scientists discovered not only the neutron star itself, but also a «small star» flying next to it, with a mass of about a quarter of the Sun's mass.
The Spektr-RG astrophysical observatory was launched on a Proton-M rocket on July 13, 2019, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The device entered its nominal working orbit around the L2 Lagrange point (one and a half million kilometers from Earth) on October 21, 2019, but it began observing the starry sky during the flight. The space observatory has two mirror telescopes: the Pavlinsky ART-XC developed by the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the German eROSITA, which was put into sleep mode in February 2022.