Astronomers have just spied an extreme new candidate that is roughly 3,000 to 4,000 light-years away.
After investigating unexplained flashes of light coming from the system, researchers have found a black widow star that is kept alive by slowly eating its smaller companion star.
We only know of a dozen or more black widow pulsars in the Milky Way. This one appears to be among the most extreme and bizarre examples of the phenomenon we have ever found.
The system has the shortest orbital period yet seen, with the black widow and its prey circling each other every 62 minutes.
The system has a third star that takes 12,000 years to travel around the other two.
Kevin Burdge, lead researcher and physicist, says that the system is unique because it was found with visible light and because it came from the center of the universe.
The cores of giant stars collapse into smaller stars. When these stars are spinning fast, they become a pulsar.
Like ultra-bright lighthouses in the Universe, pulsars spin around extremely rapidly and shine X-rays and gamma rays towards us at intervals ranging from more than one a second, down to periods that can be counted in milliseconds. Normally pulsars spin fast and die young due to how much energy they have.
If a passing star gets close, the pulsar can slowly suck material from it, and then feed off the other star until it devours it.
Burdge says that black widows are named because of how the sort of pulsar consumes the thing that recycled it, just as the spider eats its mate.
Astronomers have used X-rays and gamma rays to alert them to the black widow systems.
The team used a new technique to find the star.
The companion star locked with the black widow can get hotter than the night one, and this can be detected.
The researchers were able to find the black widow systems we know about using data from the observatory in California.
The companion star changes in brightness by a factor of 13 every 62 minutes, and they came across it while looking for new black widows.
This is the first time a black widow pulsar has been found in this way, and that makes the discovery so exciting.
The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is in Cruz deWilde.
The fiery side of the star can be seen through the black widow's gamma-rays.
The system they stumbled upon is the other part.
The system was being trailed by a rare low-metallicity cool subdwarf when the team looked back at the star's measurements.
Astronomers are scratching their heads about how the set-up could have formed in the first place with the presence of this third star.
Burdge and his colleagues have a few ideas about the origin of black widow binaries.
One of the leading hypotheses is that the gravity of the central black hole may have pulled the cluster apart, sparing the triple black widow.
Burdge says it is a complicated birth scenario.
Even weirder, when the team looked back at the X-rays they could not see it, which suggests that it may not be a black widow.
The one thing we know for certain is that a star with a day side is much hotter than a night side star.
Everything seems to point to it being a black widow. There are a few weird things about it.
The team will continue to observe the system to get a better idea of what is happening.
It could be a good candidate for learning more about physics. Astronomers know that when a star forms they get a kick that causes them to speed off.
It is not fully understood where this kick comes from. The birth story of this system could shed light on the question.
There is still a lot we don't understand. We have a new way of looking for these systems.
The research has been published.
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