PolarLight results featured on the cover of Nature Astronomy
On May 11, Professor Hua Feng and collaborators reported in Nature Astronomy a re-detection of soft X-ray polarization from the Crab nebula with the space program PolarLight, indicating that this long-awaited window in astronomy has been reopened after more than 40 years since the OSO-8 experiment in the 1970s. Interestingly, PolarLight discovered a time variation of polarization that coincides in time with a glitch of the Crab pulsar. The variation is associated with the pulsar emission but not the nebular emission, suggesting that the pulsar magnetosphere may have altered after the glitch.
Link to the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1088-1
