A wild 'Black Widow' pulsar spins in extremes only 3,000 light years away from us. It fuels its rapid spinning by slowly devouring its smaller companion star - the two only taking 62 minutes to circle each other. 📷 NASA Goddard Flight Center
. When these neutron stars are highly magnetized and rapidly spinning, they become what we call a pulsar.
But the team used a new technique to find ZTF J1406+1222: they looked for visible light coming off the star being eaten. This is the first time a black widow pulsar has been found this way, and that's part of what makes the discovery so exciting.The other part, of course, is the mysterious system they stumbled upon.
One of the leading hypotheses is that, if this particular cluster drifted into the center of the Milky Way, then the gravity of our central"It's a complicated birth scenario,"."This system has probably been floating around in the Milky Way for longer than the Sun has been around."
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