June 18, 2020

Swift J1818.0-1607 observed by XMM-Newton (Image courtesy ESA/XMM-Newton; P. Esposito et al. (2020))

An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports a study on Swift J1818.0-1607, the youngest pulsar discovered so far, which offers evidence that it’s at the same time a magnetar and one of the very few to also have radio emissions. A team of researchers have used ESA’s XMM-Newton, NASA’s Swift and NuSTAR space telescopes to detect X-ray emissions, and the Sardinia Radio Telescope to detect radio emissions in a complex observation campaign necessary to study the combined characteristics of the two types of neutron star.