Assam’s girl Barnali Das, a Ph.D. student at the NCRA-TIFR, and her supervisor Prof. Poonam Chandra and the team discovered rare radio stars.
The team led by Barnali Das introduced the appellation ‘MRP’ last year to know the characteristics of these stars.
Barnali and her supervisor Chandra found that the star produces both left (LCP) and right circularly polarized vibrations.
It said that they had found the rare class of radio stars that are hotter than the Sun with unusually strong magnetic fields and much stronger stellar wind.
The duo has performed the most comprehensive study of MRPs over an ultra-wide frequency spectrum. They have used two of the world’s leading radio telescopes: the uGMRT and the U.S.-based Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).
The NCRA said the team had also identified three more such stars in the past using the GMRT.
The success of the GMRT program has transformed the notion concerning this class of stars. It has opened up a new window to study their exotic magnetospheres, the NCRA said.
“The success of the GMRT program has revolutionized our notion about this class of stars. Though the first MRP was discovered in 2000, it was only due to the high sensitivity of the uGMRT that the discovery of more such stars as possible. The survey’s success with the uGMRT suggests that the current notion of MRPs as rare objects may not be correct. Rather, they are probably more common but are difficult to detect,” said Barnali Das.
The research work by Barnali Das, Prof. Chandra, and NCRA team has shown for the first time that the radio pulses transmitted by MRPs include a large amount of information concerning the celestial magnetosphere.
Barnali Das hails from the Bajali district of Assam, has formerly worked as an intern in National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Pune.
Presently, Das is a research scholar at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Pune.
