International team uses China’s FAST telescope to shed light on spinning pulsar spider systems
- Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou spots rapidly spinning pulsar and companion star
- Telescopes on the ground and in space should join forces to make multi-wavelength observations, says astrophysicist Zhang Bing
For the first time, an international team caught a rapidly spinning pulsar that had just finished snacking on its companion star and was ready to destroy it with strong wind and radiation.
By siphoning away streams of gas from its companion, the pulsar – superdense remains of a stellar explosion – gained mass and speed over time and spins at 225 rotations per second, they reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
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Meanwhile, the two stars orbit around each other every 53 minutes, which is the shortest orbital period ever known for such so-called spider systems, the researchers wrote.
“The two-star system is right in the middle of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. As the pulsar spins faster and faster, the feeding process – which draws them closer – stops,” said paper co-author Zhang Bing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
“Next up, powerful particles generated by the pulsar are going to push the lighter and lighter companion star away and eventually erode it.”
The detection, made possible with the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, filled an observation gap in the evolutionary theory of such binary systems, he said.