A dead star emits a beam of radiation every 4 milliseconds. Don't worry, Earth will be fine. The tiny companion of the dead star is in trouble.
A new study published March 11 on the pre-print database arXiv describes a rare class of object called a black widow pulsar. The larger member of the pair seems intent on destroying its smaller companion, just like the cannibal spider from which this type of system takes its name. In spiders, females are larger than males.
There will be no quick decapitation for this black widow; the larger star appears to be killing its partner more slowly. Over hundreds or thousands of years, the larger star has sucked in matter from the smaller star's vicinity, while simultaneously blasting the small star with strobing beams of energy, which push even more matter away into space.
Emma van der Wateren, a PhD student at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), told Live Science that it is possible that the larger star could devour the smaller one completely. Scientists hope to put this system to use. The study authors hope that by monitoring the larger star's remarkably steady pulse for suddenIrregularities, they can detect rare ripples in the fabric of space-time.
The system is very stable, unlike earlier black widow pulsars that have been discovered.
The periodic pulse of the star system J0610 was discovered by scientists in 2003 after they used a radio telescope. A type of small, dense, collapsed star that rotates extremely quickly was pegged by researchers.
The dead stars are magnetized and emit beams of radiation as they spin. When one of those beams points towards Earth, the effect is like a lighthouse with the light blinking on and off. If the light blinks once every 10 milliseconds or less, then the star is a millisecond pulsar.
The pulsars eat their companion stars, which are sun-like. The X-ray radiation from the spinning disks of the companion star can be seen across the galaxy.
A pulsar may take more from its companion than it should. A black widow pulsar is a star system with a mass less than one-tenth the mass of the sun.
J0610 was the third black widow to be detected, and seems to be one of the hungriest. The study found that the companion star measures just 0.02 solar mass and completes an around the pulsar every seven hours or so.
For their new paper, van der Wateren and her colleagues analyzed 16 years of radio telescope data from this cannibal star system. The team was surprised to find that the system was missing a few signature quirks.
The star system never showed what is known as a radio eclipse, a nearly universal phenomenon in other black widow pulsars.
When the companion star moves close to the front of the pulsar, the radio emissions from the pulsar completely disappear.
The star system never showed any timing discrepancies, sudden differences in the timing of a pulsar, or predictions.
Van der Wateren said that it was hard to explain the absence of these two phenomena. It is possible that the line of sight on this pulsar is skewed so that radio eclipses are not apparent to Earth-based telescopes. The researchers said that the black widow system is a perfect candidate for detecting the waves.
Albert Einstein first predicted these waves when the universe's most massive objects interact. Waves travel through time and space at light-speed and warp the fabric of the universe.
Astronomers hope to detect the waves by using a system called a pulsar timing array. If every pulsar in the array suddenly experienced a timing irregularity around the same time, that could be evidence that something massive, like a gravitational wave, disrupted their pulse on the way to Earth.
Van der Wateren said that they have not detected waves in this way yet.
Van der Wateren said that the discovery of black widow pulsars like this one is important.
Black widow pulsars are usually not good candidates for detection of the waves. The existence of J0610 suggests that there could be other suitable exceptions. The black widow's cannibal bite may serve a greater purpose in the end.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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