The heaviest neutron star ever discovered is ripping apart its companion while spinning around its axis more than 700 times per second.
The neutron starknown as PSR J0952-0607, was discovered in 2017 around 3000 light years From Earth in the constellation Sixtans. Recent measurements show that the star weighs 2.35 times that of the star the sunThis makes it the heaviest known neutron star.
Neutron stars are stellar bodies, remnants Supernova Giant explosions left behind stars They die after they run out of fuel in their hearts. These stars, which are only a few miles wide, boast the entire mass of the Sun and more, making them the densest objects in the world. Universe Away black holes.
Neutron stars are born spinning and can only be detected by beams of radio waves, X-rays, and gamma rays, which emit like cosmic lighthouses. Because of its flickering or pulsating nature, it is often referred to as pulsars.
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Most pulsars rotate slowly, at a rate of once per second. On the other hand, PSR J0952-0607 completes more than 700 revolutions every second, making it one of the fastest neutron stars known (as well as being the heaviest). Thanks to its unique nature, PSR J0952-0607 can help scientists answer some deep questions about the nature of these elusive creatures.
Scientists believe, for example, that when neutron stars become very heavy, they collapse in on themselves and turn into black holes. But they do not know in what mass this breakdown process occurs. Nor do they understand the state of matter within these stars, which are so dense that atoms cannot exist in their usual form inside them and are instead squashed into a soup of free-floating quarks (the components of protons and neutrons). The density of neutron stars is so high that one cubic inch (16 cubic centimeters) weighs more than 10 billion tons.
“We know roughly how matter behaves at nuclear densities, as it does in the nucleus of a uranium atom,” said Alex Filippenko, distinguished professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the authors of a study describing the star. statement. “A neutron star is like one giant core, but when you have one and a half solar masses of that matter, which is about 500,000 Earth masses of cores all clinging to each other, it’s not at all clear how they’re going to behave.”
PSR J0952-0607 is part of a file Binary system Known as the Black Widow Pulsar. Named after the infamous black widow spiders, which eat their partners after mating, these systems consist of a neutron star devouring matter from a companion star. This falling matter is responsible for the mind-boggling rotation speed of these pulsars.
The neutron stars at the core of Black Widow pulsars are very difficult to study on their own because they are so faint.
Astronomers were able to estimate the mass of PSR J0952-0607 by focusing on the remains of the companion star, which has now been reduced to the size of a large planet, about 20 times the size of the planet. Jupiter. Using the 3.2-foot (10-meter) WM Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii, they were able to obtain spectra of visible light emitted by the disappearing companion. By comparing the spectra with those of similar stars, they were able to measure the orbital velocity of the companion star and calculate the mass of the neutron star.
Filippenko and his colleague Roger W. Romani, professor of astrophysics at Stanford University, have studied about a dozen black widow binary systems in recent years, but only six of them have had a companion star bright enough to enable them to calculate the mass of a neutron star.
“By combining this measurement with that of many other black widows, we show that neutron stars must have reached at least this mass, 2.35 plus or minus 0.17 solar masses. [before collapsing into black holes]Roman said in the statement. This in turn provides some of the strongest constraints on the property of matter at many times the density visible in atomic nuclei. In fact, many common models of dense matter physics were excluded by this result.”
the study The publication was accepted in Astrophysical Journal Letters and is currently available online through the Arxiv repository.
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