neutron star tagged posts

Powerful Warm Winds Seen Blowing from a Neutron Star as it Rips up its Companion

Image Credit: Gabriel Pérez (IAC)

Using the most powerful telescopes on Earth and in space, a team of astronomers has found for the first time blasts of hot, warm and cold winds from a neutron star whilst it consumes matter from a nearby star. The discovery provides new insight into the behaviours of some of the most extreme objects in the universe.

Low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) are systems containing a neutron star or black hole. They are fuelled by material ripped from a neighbouring star, a process known as accretion. Most accretion occurs during violent eruptions where the systems brighten dramatically. At the same time, some of the material that spirals in is propelled back into space in the form of disc winds and jets.

The most common signs of outflowing material from as...

Read More

Nature of Fast Radio Bursts Clarified

Periodic fast radio burst found bare, unobscured by strong binary wind
Westerbork dishes (left) detected a periodic, short fast radio burst in the blue, high-frequency radio sky. Time passed, the steady background stars turned into trails. Only much later did the same source emit in the red, low-frequency radio sky. The LOFAR telescope (right) now detected these for the first time. This chromatic behaviour shows the bursts are not periodically blocked by binary star winds. Credit: Joeri van Leeuwen

By connecting two of the biggest radio telescopes in the world, astronomers have discovered that a simple binary wind cannot cause the puzzling periodicity of a fast radio burst after all. The bursts may come from a highly magnetized, isolated neutron star...

Read More

Mystery Astronomical Object in ‘Mass Gap’: Neutron Star? Black Hole?

Dual_bhs_annotated
In August of 2019, the LIGO-Virgo gravitational-wave network witnessed the merger of a black hole with 23 times the mass of our sun and a mystery object 2.6 times the mass of the sun. Scientists do not know if the mystery object was a neutron star or black hole, but either way it set a record as being either the heaviest known neutron star or the lightest known black hole. Image credit: LIGO/Caltech/MIT/R. Hurt (IPAC)

Researchers have discovered what is either the heaviest known neutron star, or the lightest black hole. When the most massive stars die, they collapse under their own gravity and leave behind black holes; when stars that are a bit less massive die, they explode in supernovas and leave behind dense, dead remnants of stars called neutron stars...

Read More

Stellar Winds, the Source material for the Universe, are Clumpy

Illustration of a high-mass X-ray binary system made up of a compact, incredibly dense neutron star paired with a massive ‘normal’ supergiant star. New data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that the neutron star in the high-mass X-ray binary, OAO 1657-415, passed through a dense patch of stellar wind from its companion star, demonstrating the clumpy nature of stellar winds.
Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

Data recorded by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory of a neutron star as it passed through a dense patch of stellar wind emanating from its massive companion star provide valuable insight about the structure and composition of stellar winds and about the environment of the neutron star itself...

Read More