binary system tagged posts

A long time ago, in two galaxies about 900 million light-years away, two black holes each gobbled up their neutron star companions, triggering gravitational waves that finally hit Earth in January 2020.

Discovered by an international team of astrophysicists including Northwestern University researchers, two events—detected just 10 days apart—mark the first-ever detection of a black hole merging with a neutron star. The findings will enable researchers to draw the first conclusions about the origins of these rare binary systems and how often they merge.

“Gravitational waves have allowed us to detect collisions of pairs of black holes and pairs of neutron stars, but the mixed collision of a black hole with a neutron star has been the elusive missing piece of the family picture...

Researchers have discovered an unusual pulsar – one of deep space’s magnetized spinning neutron-star ‘lighthouses’ that emits highly focused radio waves from its magnetic poles. It is unusual because the masses of its two neutron stars are quite different — with one far larger than the other. The breakthrough provides clues about unsolved mysteries in astrophysics — including the expansion rate of the Universe (the Hubble constant).

The newly discovered pulsar (known as PSR J1913+1102) is part of a binary system — which means that it is locked in a fiercely tight orbit with another neutron star.

Neutron stars are the dead stellar remnants of a supernova...

A representation of two competing black hole models: lamp-post and extended. The black dot is the black hole, blue is its accretion disk, and red is the corona.
Credit: Fumiya Imazato, Hiroshima University

X-ray polarimetry resolves shape of matter around Cygnus X-1 black hole. In an international collaboration between Japan and Sweden, scientists clarified how gravity affects the shape of matter near the black hole in binary system Cygnus X-1. Their findings, which were published in Nature Astronomy this month, may help scientists further understand the physics of strong gravity and the evolution of black holes and galaxies.

Near the center of the constellation of Cygnus is a star orbiting the first black hole discovered in the universe...

The Ant Nebula, as imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, resembles the head and body of a garden ant. In reality, it’s the result of a dying sun-like star and complex interactions of material at its heart. Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

An international team of astronomers have discovered an unusual laser emission that suggests the presence of a double star system hidden at the heart of the “spectacular” Ant Nebula. The extremely rare phenomenon is connected to the death of a star and was discovered in observations made by European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel space observatory.

When low- to middleweight stars like our Sun approach the end of their lives they eventually become dense, white dwarf stars...