neutron star Archives

November 14, 2023November 14, 2023 by Mark Thompson

When Stars Consume Their Partners, We Could Detect a Blast of Neutrinos

Three thousand light-years away, the Cat's Eye Nebula, a dying star throws off shells of glowing gas. This image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the nebula to be one of the most complex planetary nebulae known.The features seen in the Cat's Eye are so complex that astronomers suspect the central object may actually be a binary star system. — The Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC6543) is thought to be caused by a binary star system. Credit - NASA/HST

You might be familiar with the bizarre ritual of the female praying mantis which, I’m told, bites off the head and eats other body parts of the poor male they just mated with. It seems consuming partners is not unheard of. It’s even seen in the lives of stars where binary stars orbit one another closely and one star ultimately consumes the other. If the victim is a neutron star a burst of neutrinos can be generated and a new study reveals they might just be detectable on Earth.

November 8, 2023November 8, 2023 by Mark Thompson

Astronomers are Hoping to Detect Gravitational Waves Coming from Supernova 1987A

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows Supernova 1987A within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy to our Milky Way. — Hubble Space Telescope image of SN1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud (Credit : NASA)

A supernova explosion is a cataclysmic explosion that marks the violent end of a massive star’s life. During the event, the star releases immense amounts of energy, often outshining the combined light from all the stars in the host galaxy for a very brief period of time. The explosion produces heavy elements and spreads them out among the stars to contribute to the formation of new stars and planets. The closest supernova in recent years occurred in the Large Magellanic Cloud in 1987 (SN1987A) and now, a team of astronomers have searched through mountains of data to see if they can detect gravitational waves from the remnant.

September 14, 2023September 14, 2023 by Brian Koberlein

If Neutron Stars Have Mountains, They Should Generate Gravitational Waves

Artist's depiction of a highly magnetize neutron star known as a magnetar. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger

A neutron star is 2 solar masses compressed into a ball only 12 kilometers wide. Its surface gravity is so immense it compresses atoms and molecules into raw nuclei and squeezes electrons into protons transforming them into neutrons. Given such immense pressures and densities, you might assume neutron stars have an almost perfectly smooth surface. But you’d be wrong because we know that neutron stars can have mountains.

July 21, 2023July 21, 2023 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Record-Breaking Magnetar was There in the Data All Along

An artist’s impression of the ultra-long period magnetar—a rare type of star with extremely strong magnetic fields that can produce powerful bursts of energy. Credit: ICRAR

The cosmic zoo has strange beasts that astronomers stumble across in the most fascinating ways. Not long ago a team in Australia found a highly unusual magnetar, one of the weirder denizens of the starry zoo. It’s called GPM J1839-10 and it lies some 15,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Scutum.

May 22, 2023May 22, 2023 by Andy Tomaswick

The Heaviest Neutron Stars Could Have Strange Matter Cores

Physics gets weird at the extremes. Astrophysics usually deals with the extremely large – large energies, large gravities, and lots and lots of stuff. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, typically deals with the extremely small – quarks and other particles that are completely unseen by the human eye. So far, despite decades of trying, no Grand Unified Theory (or any other theory) combines these two opposed theories. This makes it all the more interesting that a team from the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed an idea that the interior cores of neutron stars, one of the most extreme examples of large extremes in the universe, might be made up of a type of tiny particle that makes up part of the “soup” of quantum mechanics called a strange quark.

April 18, 2023April 18, 2023 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Neutron Star Behaves Like a Mini-quasar

MIT astronomers mapped the “disk winds” associated with the accretion disk around Hercules X-1, a system in which a neutron star is drawing material away from a sun-like star, represented as the teal sphere. The findings may offer clues to how supermassive black holes shape entire galaxies. Credits:Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT. Based on an image of Hercules X-1 by D. Klochkov, European Space Agency.

There’s a wobbly X-ray-bright binary object in our galaxy called Hercules X-1 that’s blowing a mighty wind off to surrounding space. The system consists of a neutron star paired with a sun-like star. The neutron star is drawing material away from its companion. Its resulting accretion spins rapidly, and that whips up powerful winds. They affect the region of nearby space. That’s eerily similar to how a quasar’s central black hole sends out winds to influence its entire host galaxy.

March 7, 2023March 7, 2023 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

The Neutron Star That Thinks It’s a Black Hole

Artist's impression of the blazing eruption of the neutron star Swift J1858 compared to the black hole GRS 1915+105. Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz (IAC)

Black holes and neutron stars are among the odder denizens of the cosmic zoo. They’re both dense collections of matter and, except for supermassive black holes, are the end states of massive stars. Fundamentally, they’re two different types of objects that are detectable via the activity in the accretion disks that form around them. Astronomers recently observed an object that acted like a black hole but turned out to be a neutron star. The clues lay in the accretion disk surrounding it.

March 3, 2023February 28, 2023 by Paul M. Sutter

Astronomers Go Hunting for Mysterious Q-balls

A false-color image of the Smith Cloud made with data from the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). New analysis indicates that it is wrapped in a dark matter halo. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF

Our universe may feature large, macroscopic clumps of dark matter, known as q-balls. These q-balls would be absolutely invisible, but they may reveal their presence through tiny magnifications of starlight.

February 20, 2023February 20, 2023 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Some Elements Arrived on Earth by Surfing Supernova Shock Waves

Neutron-neutron star mergers are one way that heavy radioactive isotopes of elements found on Earth could be created. Courtesy ESO.

When stars die, they spread the elements they’ve created in their cores out to space. But, other objects and processes in space also create elements. Eventually, that “star stuff” scatters across the galaxy in giant debris clouds. Later on—sometimes millions of years later—it settles onto planets. What’s the missing link between element creation and deposition on some distant world?

February 15, 2023February 15, 2023 by Laurence Tognetti

Magnetars are Extreme in Every Way, Even Their Volcanoes

Artist rendition of a magnetar eruption. (Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

In a recent study published in Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers led by NASA and The George Washington University examined data from an October 2020 detection of what’s known as a “large spin-down glitch event”, also known as an “anti-glitch”, from a type of neutron star known as a magnetar called SGR 1935+2154 and located approximately 30,000 light-years from Earth, with SGR standing for soft gamma repeaters. Such events occur when the magnetar experiences a sudden decrease in its rotation rate, which in this case was followed by three types of radio bursts known as extragalactic fast radio bursts (FRBs) and then pulsed radio emissions for one month straight after the initial rotation rate decrease.