Data from the Chandra X-ray Telescope has revealed spider pulsars, which are a group of dead stars, in globular cluster Omega Centauri "preying' on nearby stars. The Chandra team explains.
Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart
Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart
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00:04Visit Chandra's beautiful universe. Omega Centauri
00:08A horde of dead stars
00:12known as spider pulsars are obliterating companion stars within their
00:16reach. Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory
00:20of the globular cluster Omega Centauri are helping astronomers
00:24understand how these spider pulsars prey on nearby stars.
00:28A pulsar is the spinning, dense core that remains
00:32after a massive star collapses into itself. Rapidly
00:36rotating neutron stars can produce beams of radiation.
00:40Like a rotating lighthouse beam, the radiation can be observed as a powerful
00:44pulsing source of radiation, or pulsar.
00:48Some pulsars spin around dozens to hundreds of times per second,
00:52and these are known as millisecond pulsars.
00:56Spider pulsars are a special class of millisecond
01:00pulsars and get their name from the damage they inflict on small
01:04companion stars in orbit around them. Through winds of energetic
01:08particles streaming from their surfaces, the spider pulsars
01:13methodically strip the companion stars of their outer layers.
01:17Astronomers recently discovered 18 millisecond pulsars in
01:21Omega Centauri, located about 17,700 light-years
01:25from Earth, using radio telescopes. A pair of
01:29astronomers from the University of Alberta in Canada then looked at Chandra data
01:33of Omega Centauri to see how many of the millisecond pulsars give off
01:37X-rays. They found 11 millisecond pulsars
01:41emitting X-rays, and five of those were spider pulsars, concentrated near the
01:45center of Omega Centauri. The researchers next
01:49combined the data of Omega Centauri with Chandra observations of
01:53the energetic spider pulsars in 12 other globular clusters.
01:57Spider pulsars are typically separated from their companions by only about
02:011 to 14 times the distance between the Earth and Moon.
02:05This close proximity, cosmically speaking, causes the energetic
02:09particles from the pulsars to be particularly damaging to their
02:13companion stars.
02:17Chandra's sharp X-ray vision is crucial for studying millisecond pulsars
02:21in globular clusters, because they often contain large numbers of X-ray
02:26sources in a small part of the sky, making it difficult to distinguish
02:30sources from each other.
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