A Pulsar and Star are Orbiting Each Other Every 62 Minutes. The Fastest 'Black Widow' Binary Ever Seen - Universe Today
The latest black widow binary is even more strange than its two dozen siblings in the galaxy. Not only is it gobbling its companion down, but the hapless neighbor star suffers its fate while in a rapid 62-minute orbit with the pulsar. That’s one of the fastest orbital dances ever seen in one of these binaries.
That’s not all. As they say in late-night television ads, wait—there’s more. An additional star is part of this system. It lies pretty far from the central pair and moves in a very large orbit that takes it in the neighborhood of the pulsar and the slowly eroding companion star once every 10,000 years. The presence of the second star makes this a triple black widow system.
In this case, the rapidly disappearing star was an obvious clue. Since astronomers have not directly detected gamma- and X-ray emissions from the companion pulsar, they got creative and focused on finding the close companion star. According to astronomer Kevin Burdge, a post-doctoral researcher at MIT, and the first author of a paper inabout this wacky system, the superheated side of the cannibalized star made it easier to find.
As it turns out, the star’s “day side”—the hemisphere that constantly faces the pulsar—is clobbered with high-energy pulsar radiation. It eats away at the star. That radiation bath makes the companion star’s day side much hotter than its night side.Burdge and his team at MIT used observations from a number of sources to locate this system. That included the
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