What would life be like on a planet orbiting a pulsar? Astronomers estimate that the Milky Way contains an estimated 1 billion neutron stars, of which about 200,000 are pulsars –neutron stars of only 10 to 30 kilometers in diameter with enormous magnetic fields, that accrete matter and regularly burst out large amounts of X-rays and other energetic particles. So far, 3000 pulsars have been studied and only 5 pulsar planets have been found. In 1992, the first exoplanets ever were discovered around pulsar PSR B1257+12.
“If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the universe and we hypothesize the existence of space-time tunnels, what we get is that our galaxy could really contain one of these tunnels, and that the tunnel could even be the size of the galaxy itself. But there’s more,” explained Paolo Salucci, astrophysicist with SISSA and a dark matter expert. “We could even travel through this tunnel, since, based on our calculations, it could be navigable. Salucci is among the authors of the paper published in Annals of Physics.
There are several hundred billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. At a conservative estimate, several billion of them are orbited by planets capable of supporting life. There may be more habitable planets in the Galaxy than there are people on planet Earth. But our human eyes are hopelessly inadequate for revealing the true nature of the Galaxy.
“While two billion years is an extremely long time compared to a human lifetime, it is a very short time on cosmic timescales,” said astrophysicist Marius Cautun, with Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology. “The destruction of the Large Magellanic Cloud, as it is devoured by the Milky Way, will wreak havoc with our galaxy, waking up the black hole that lives at its center and turning our galaxy into an ‘active galactic nucleus’ or quasar.”
There should be many more dwarf galaxies that have yet to be discovered and that are hiding at large distances from the Milky Way center, observed Tobias K. Fritz, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC).
