Spider pulsars are a type of millisecond pulsar that strips their companion stars of their atmospheres through energetic winds.
A pulsar is the spinning dense core that remains after a massive star collapses into itself to form a neutron star.
Rapidly rotating neutron stars can produce beams of radiation. Like a rotating lighthouse beam, the radiation can be observed as a powerful, pulsing source of radiation, or pulsar.
Some pulsars spin around dozens to hundreds of times per second, and these are known as millisecond pulsars.
Spider pulsars are a special class of millisecond pulsars, and get their name for the damage they inflict on small companion stars in orbit around them.
Through winds of energetic particles streaming out from the spider pulsars, the outer layers of the pulsar’s companion stars are methodically stripped away.
Using the Parkes and MeerKAT radio telescopes, astronomers recently discovered 18 millisecond pulsars in a globular cluster called Omega Centauri.
“Omega Centauri, also known as NGC 5139, is the most massive stellar system in the Galaxy found so far, with a stellar mass of 3.6 million solar masses,” said University of Alberta astronomers Jiaqi Zhao and Craig Heinke.
“It is located in the constellation of Centaurus at a distance of 5,430 parsecs (17,710 light-years) from the Sun.”
In their study, the authors looked at Chandra data of Omega Centauri to see if any of the millisecond pulsars give off X-rays.
They found 11 millisecond pulsars emitting X-rays, and five of those were spider pulsars concentrated near the center of Omega Centauri.
The researchers next combined the data of Omega Centauri with Chandra observations of 26 spider pulsars in 12 other globular clusters.
There are two varieties of spider pulsars based on the size of the star being destroyed.
‘Redback’ spider pulsars are damaging companion stars weighing between a tenth and a half the mass of the Sun. Meanwhile, the ‘black widow’ spider pulsars…
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