The mystery at the heart of an inexplicable, bright point of gamma-ray radiation in the sky has been solved: there is a deadly spider star flying a second, stronger star to pieces, which quickly sends out bursts of gamma radiation
“Black widows” and “redbacks” in astronomy, as Live Science reported earlier, are species of neutron stars – the ultra-dense remnant core of exploding giant stars. Some neutron stars, called pulsars, rotate at intervals and flicker like lighthouses. The fastest rotation among them is millisecond pulsars. When a millisecond pulsar is locked in a rare, rigid orbit with a light star, it slowly cuts its mate into pieces with each rotation. These binary cannibals are known as black widow or redback stars. Now, with the help of civil scientists, a team of researchers has unveiled a new redback at the heart of a bright system known as PSR J2039–5617.
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Since its discovery in 2014, researchers have suspected that PSR J2039–5617 contains a millisecond pulsar and a second star. The bright source of X-rays, gamma rays and visible light correspond to the expected properties of such a system. But to prove that it required scales of telescopic data and more number-matching than an ordinary computer could do in a century.
To prove that the galaxy is indeed a redback, the researchers rely on the computing power of Einstein @ Home – a project of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Max Planck Institute of Germany, where more than 500,000 volunteers leave their idle computers collaborate on complex astronomy problems. .
In two months, the researchers revealed that PSR J2039–5617 contains a deadly redback, which heats one side of its companion so that the side looks brighter and blue. The redback’s massive gravity also distorts the shape of its companion, causing “the apparent size of the star to fluctuate across the orbit”, lead author Colin Clark, an astronomer at the University of Manchester, said in a statement,
The radio emission of the redback is also sometimes obscured by material blown off the companions’ star. All the features of the complex system produce strange, varying light patterns, described in a paper published in March (and now available online) in the magazine. Monthly notices from the Royal Astronomical Society.
Originally published on Live Science.