Science Talk – What Are Pulsar Planets? (2022)
4 points
3 days ago
| 1 comment
| spaceaustralia.com
| HN
vlovich123
5 hours ago
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> So, maybe there are lots of pulsar planets out there, and we just can’t measure their influence on their parent pulsars? Well, a bunch of scientists recently looked at this and determined that even if we factor in this observational bias, pulsar planets are still fairly rare.

This is stated without any link but I wonder if such conclusions are purely a function of relying on 20 year old satellites. The images from JWST are remarkable as compared with Hubble and many assumptions that were based on Hubble data turned out to be wrong once we got higher resolution. Would a more modern xray satellite give us a similar correction?

The other part that makes this interesting is they need the wobble to detect the planet which requires the pulsar to be in our horizontal plane. How do they infer what properties pulsars we can’t do this analysis for demonstrate? Are they just extrapolating from pulsars we see vs pulsars we see with planets?

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