![]() Silva and his team, together with researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles in the United States, have adapted a computer model called OSIRIS so that it can run on supercomputers, allowing it to follow billions of particles simultaneously. ![]() In the past, such simulations have struggled to mimic the staggering number of particles generated around pulsars. To find out, researchers are now turning to powerful computer simulations to model what might be going on. ![]() Scientists also still do not understand why the radio waves emitted by the plasma around pulsars have properties similar to light in a laser beam – a wave structure known as coherence. 'These fields are so strong, and they twist and reconnect so violently, that they essentially apply Einstein’s equation of E = mc2 and create matter and antimatter out of energy.' Professor Luis Silva, Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugalīut the exact conditions necessary to produce a plasma containing positrons remain unclear. Together, the electrons and positrons are thought to form a super-heated form of matter known as a plasma around a pulsar. ‘These fields are so strong, and they twist and reconnect so violently, that they essentially apply Einstein’s equation of E = mc 2 and create matter and antimatter out of energy,’ said Professor Luis Silva at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal. But astrophysicists think the conditions needed to forge positrons may still exist in the powerful electric and magnetic fields generated around pulsars. The universe was briefly filled with these superheated, electrically charged particles in the seconds that followed the Big Bang before all antimatter vanished, taking the positrons with it. ![]() Researchers believe that these enigmatic, highly-energetic pulses of radiation are produced by bursts of electrons and their antimatter twins, positrons. For 50 years, astronomers have puzzled over strange radio waves and gamma rays thrown out from the spinning remnants of dead stars called pulsars.
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