Bolton School girls from across several year groups learnt about pulsars and dark matter in the latest Café Scientifique lunchtime enrichment lecture.
University of Manchester PhD students Susmita Sett and Sankarshana Srinivasan delivered a fascinating insight, where pupils learnt that pulsars are dense, fast, rotating periodic remains of a massive dead star, that they form at the end of a supernova explosion, are found in supernova remnants (SNRs), that there are very interesting types of pulsars such as spiders and mergers, that one can search for pulsars with the help of their periodicity and that they are very useful in helping us understand the Universe better. The mystery of dark matter was also explored, with consideration of The Bullet Cluster – when galaxy clusters collide, Galaxy Rotation Curves and how objects that are near something heavy (large mass) move faster as well as the current theory for how the universe works, the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Theory.