Image of the Day: "The Black Widow" Pulsar

 

The pulsar, a.k.a. the "Black Widow," is moving through the galaxy at a speed of almost a million kilometers per hour. A bow shock wave due to this motion is visible to optical telescopes, shown in this image as the greenish crescent shape. The pressure behind the bow shock creates a second shock wave that sweeps the cloud of high-energy particles back from the pulsar to form the cocoon.

This composite X-ray (red/white) and optical (green/blue) image reveals an elongated cloud, or cocoon, of high-energy particles flowing behind the rapidly rotating pulsar, B1957+20 (white point-like source).

The pulsar is emitting intense high-energy radiation that appears to be destroying a companion star through evaporation. It is one of a class of extremely rapid rotating neutron stars called millisecond pulsars. Calculations suggest that the "black widow" will evaporate away its companion in about a billion years.

These objects are thought to be very old neutron stars that have been spun up to rapid rotation rates with millisecond periods by pulling material off their companions. The advanced age, very rapid rotation rate, and relatively low magnetic field of millisecond pulsars put them in a separate class from young pulsars, such as the Crab Nebula. 

Pulsars rank at or near the top of freaky phenomena found in our Universe. In the early 1930s, California Institute of Technology astrophysicist, Fred Zwicky, an immigrant from Bulgaria, focused his attention on a question that had long troubled astronomers: the appearance of random, unexplained points of light, new stars.

It occurred to Zwicky that if a star collapsed to the sort of density found in the core of atoms, the result would be an unimaginably compacted core: atoms would be crushed together with their electrons squeezed into the nucleus, forming neutrons and a neutron star, with a core so dense that a single spoonful would weigh 200 billion pounds. But there's more, Zwicky  concluded: with the collapse of the star there would be  huge amounts of leftover energy that would result in a massive explosion,  the biggest in the known universe that we called today supernovas.

Most neutron stars house incredibly large magnetic fields. If they are spinning rapidly they make fabulous clocks, cosmic radio beacons we call pulsars. Pulsars can keep time to an accuracy better that one microsecond per year. Some pulsars generate more than 1000 pulses per second, which means, as Lawrence Krauss wrote in The Physics of Star Trek, that an object with the mass of the Sun packed into an object 10 to 20 kilometers across is rotating over 1000 times per second, or more that half the speed of light!

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/b1957/

Image Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

Comments

[ramkumar]

Correct me if i am wrong ...It is rotating at a speed nearly half the speed of light not more than half the speed'(even though milli second pulsars rotate at nearely the speed of light)This velocity will be decreasing slowly but steadily, except by sudden variations.The fastest spinning pulsar is Ter5ad a binary system in the globular star cluster Terzan 5 ,spinning at a rate of 716 Hz...

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/b1957/closer_look.html

[Ralph Garner]

This poses another problem for mankind. If one of these pulsars traveling at this velocity, should pass withing a great distance of earth or even the solar System, could pose a threat. With a shock wave of this magnitude coming close to our solar system, it could mean the end of this part of the Milky Way Galaxy. I think that we are sitting ducks for many unknowns out there in space. There must be traveling unknowns that we haven't come in contact with yet with our instrumennts. Im sure that what ever phenomenon we have witnessed here on earth is repeated in outer space in much greaster magnitudes and velocities.

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