Astronomers have discovered black widows and impalas in space. Although these cosmic objects do not kill their peers, the stars share their eight-legged counterparts’ violent behavior towards companions.
In addition to the running spider stars, the researchers also discovered a bizarre black widow redback cross. The scientists used the now destroyed Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico to discover the strange stars.
Spider stars are types of millisecond pulses, or neutron star which acts like exact clocks in the sky, rotates at least once every 30 milliseconds and flickers like a lighthouse with each rotation. Neutron stars, the small, compressed nuclei of old, exploding stars, often tear material from other stars locked into binary orbits, and use the pressure of that precipitating material to reach a pulse rate. However, spider stars are rare and special versions of these stars: they orbit so close to their binary companions that they blow away their surfaces and inhale large amounts of material like a spider tearing its limb from the limb.
In a new article, researchers identify three new black widows and a redback in the Milky Way. They also found a spider that challenges categorization, almost like a cross between the two species.
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If a spider has reduced its companion to significantly less than one-tenth the mass of the sun (usually 0.02 to 0.03 times the mass of the sun), the star is called a black widow. Redbacks have firmer companions who boast more than a tenth of the sun’s mass. These binary companions of redbacks frequently move between the spider and the Earth, creating temporary eclipses. The shrunken companions of black widows usually do not pull off the trick.
The apparent crossbreed is difficult to categorize. For now, researchers have described it as a redback because his companion sometimes obscures his ticking light. And the companion has a mass of at least 0.055 times the mass of the sun (possibly larger), which would be quite heavy for a black widow, although fairly light for a redback. For now, the exact mechanisms of the system are still a mystery.
Studies like these may become more difficult in the future. The article, published on January 1 arXiv database, based on data collected between 2013 and 2018 using the Arecibo 305-m radio telescope that has since collapsed, as Live Science reports.
Originally published on Live Science.