Black holes, magnetars, blue variable stars, and strange new worlds are just some of the curiosities of the Milky Way. It's not an easy name to wrap your head around, especially if you're afraid of spiders. These things exist in our universe and they are fascinating.
Imagine a pair of stars in space, one dancing with the other. The pulsar has a strong pull on its companion star. It pulls clumps of gas out of the star so it can eat. The happy meal gives the pulsar a new life since it slows down over time. The companion star is destroyed in the process.
Why is the name black widow? The cannibalization action of a black widow spider is similar to what she does to her male companion after they mate. Astronomers liked the analogy and voila, we have black widow.
The black widow is more strange than its siblings. The hapless neighbor star is in a rapid 62-minute orbit with the pulsar, and it is gobbling its companion down. That is one of the fastest dances ever seen.
That isn't all. They say in late-night television ads that there is more. This system has an additional star. It lies far from the central pair and is in the vicinity of the slowly decaying companion star once every 10,000 years. This is a triple black widow system with the presence of the second star. The existence of this triplet raises a lot of questions, mostly aimed at finding it in the first place, and then figuring out how the grouping formed in the first place.
The catalog name looks like a secret code. The numbers tell you where it is in the sky. The grouping is about 3000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers at MIT were the first to observe it and its dying mate. Every black widow has been detected by the X-ray and gamma-ray emissions it gives off. The twist for finding this one was to look for something different because it isn't very bright in those regions.
The star was an obvious clue. Astronomers got creative and focused on finding the close companion star since they didn't directly detect the emissions from the companion pulsar. Kevin Burdge, the first author of a paper in Nature about this wacky system, said that the superheated side of the star made it easier to find.
The hemisphere that constantly faces the pulsar is clobbered with high-energy pulsar radiation. The star is eaten away by it. The day side of the companion star is much hotter than the night side.
The system was found by Burdge and his team at MIT. The Gaia space telescope database, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and optical information from the Zwicky Transient Facility in California were included. A star that varied in brightness by a factor of 13 every 62 minutes was spotted by them after testing their observing methods. It was a moment when they found ZTF J1406+1222.
The evolutionary story of this grouping is complex. To get a triple black widow like this, you need three things, according to Burdge and his team.
The triple black widow system is thought to have been born inside a cluster that was part of the Milky Way. The bulge contains about 150 dense old star systems. These clusters have played an important role in the history of the universe. The home cluster of ZTR J 1506+1222 had an unfortunate experience wandering too close to Sagittarius A* and its black hole. The cluster was torn apart, but the triple black widow system survived. It has been traveling through the universe ever since.
Is there any other such system out there? Burdge isn't ruling them out, they see a star with a day side that is much hotter than the night side. There are a few weird things about it.
The team will keep an eye on this new system. This discovery will help them find more black widow binaries in the universe.
The National Science Foundation supported this work.
For more information.
Astronomers have found a black widow with the shortest path yet.
There is a black widow in a triple.
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