Astronomers have discovered 21 neutron stars orbiting Sun-like stars, revealing a rare cosmic pairing in our galaxy.
In a groundbreaking study, a team of astronomers has identified 21 neutron stars in orbit around Sun-like stars, a rare pairing that sheds new light on the behavior and formation of these dense stellar remnants.
“Gaia is continuously scanning the sky and measuring the wobbles of more than a billion stars, so the odds are good for finding even very rare objects,” Kareem El-Badry, an assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech and an adjunct scientist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said in a, involved a global team and incorporated data from ground-based observatories, including the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawai’i, La Silla Observatory in Chile, and the Whipple Observatory in Arizona.
“These are the first neutron stars discovered purely due to their gravitational effects,” El-Badry explained.The discovery challenges current models of binary star formation, as it remains unclear how a neutron star and a Sun-like star can remain gravitationally bound following a supernova explosion. “We still do not have a complete model for how these binaries form,” El-Badry admitted.
The findings suggest such pairings are exceptionally rare, with El-Badry estimating that only about one in a million Sun-like stars has a neutron star companion in a wide orbit.
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