Tiny Star Unleashes Gargantuan Beam of Matter, Anti-Matter

Astronomers have imaged a beam of matter and antimatter that is 40 trillion miles long with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The record-breaking beam is powered by a pulsar, a rapidly rotating collapsed star with a strong magnetic field.

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Stanford Univ./M. de Vries; Optical: NSF/AURA/Gemini Consortium

Mysterious Object Unlike Anything Astronomers Have Seen Before

A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before.

Super Star takes on Black Holes in Jet Contest

A super-dense star formed in the aftermath of a supernova explosion is shooting out powerful jets of material into space, research suggests.

An artist’s impression of the binary star system PSR J1023+0038. The extremely dense, rapidly-spinning neutron star, just 10-15 km in size, is in a close orbit with a more normal companion star. The strong gravity of the neutron star pulls gas from its companion, which spirals in towards the neutron star, forming a disk. Some fraction of that gas gets accelerated outwards in energetic, oppositely-directed jets, which give off the radio waves that can be seen by Earth’s radio telescopes

Neutron Stars Strike Back at Black Holes in Jet Contest

Some neutron stars may rival black holes in their ability to accelerate powerful jets of material to nearly the speed of light, astronomers using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have discovered.

Artist’s impression of material flowing from a companion star onto a neutron star. The material forms an accretion disk around the neutron star and produces a superfast jet of ejected material. The material closest to the neutron star is so hot that it glows in X-rays, while the jet is most prominent at radio wavelengths. A similar mechanism is at work with black holes

Pulsar Punches Hole in Stellar Disk

A fast-moving pulsar appears to have punched a hole in a disk of gas around its companion star and launched a fragment of the disk outward at a speed of about 4 million miles per hour. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is tracking this cosmic clump, which appears to be picking up speed as it moves out.

This trio of images contains evidence from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory that a clump of stellar material has been jettisoned away from a double star system at incredibly high speeds. This system, known as PSR B1259-63/LS 2883 – or B1259 for short – is comprised of two objects in orbit around one another. The first is a star about 30 times as massive as the Sun that has a disk of material swirling around it. The other is a pulsar, an ultra-dense neutron star left behind when an even more massive star underwent a supernova explosion. Source: NASA

Determining the distance from Circinus X-1 thanks to light echoes observed by Chandra

Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has helped provide a rare opportunity to determine the distance to an object on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy.

Source: Chandra X-ray Observatory

SGR 1745-2900: Magnetar Near Supermassive Black Hole Delivers Surprises

Since its discovery two years ago when it gave off a burst of X-rays, astronomers have been actively monitoring the magnetar, dubbed SGR 1745-2900, with Chandra and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton. 

NASA/CXC/INAF/F.Coti Zelati et al

Neutron stars

via chandra.harvard.edu

The nucleus of an atom contains more than 99.9 percent of the mass of an atom, yet it has a diameter of only 1/100,000 that of the electron cloud. The electrons themselves take up little space, but the pattern of their orbit defines the size of the atom, which is therefore 99.9999999999999% open space!

What we perceive as painfully solid when we bump against a rock is really a hurly-burly of electrons moving through empty space so fast that we can’t see—or feel—the emptiness. What would matter look like if it weren’t empty, if we could crush the electron cloud down to the size of the nucleus? Suppose we could generate a force strong enough to crush all the emptiness out of a rock roughly the size of a football stadium. The rock would be squeezed down to the size of a grain of sand and would still weigh 4 million tons!

Such extreme forces occur in nature when the central part of a massive star collapses to form a neutron star. The atoms are crushed completely, and the electrons are jammed inside the protons to form a star composed almost entirely of neutrons. The result is a tiny star that is like a gigantic nucleus and has no empty space.

A pure gamma-ray pulsar that rotates 38 millionths of a Hertz faster than before

Max Planck scientists discover a young and energetic neutron star with unusually irregular rotation.

Credit: NASA/Fermi/Cruz de Wilde

Simulating a proto-neutron star

Each century, about two massive stars in our own galaxy explode, producing magnificent supernovae. These stellar explosions send fundamental, uncharged particles called neutrinos streaming our way and generate ripples called gravitational waves in the fabric of space-time. Scientists are waiting for the neutrinos and gravitational waves from about 1,000 supernovae that have already exploded at distant locations in the Milky Way to reach us. Here on Earth, large, sensitive neutrino and gravitational-wave detectors have the ability to detect these respective signals, which will provide information about what happens in the core of collapsing massive stars just before they explode.

Brake system for stars

According to the classical understanding of newly-born neutron stars they should rotate more than 1000 times per second. Observations tell, however, that they rotate "only" 10 to 100 times per second and that their specific angular momentum is with 10¹⁴ cm²/s only 1% of the predicted values for angular momentum conservation. Neutron stars share this strong discrepancy with white dwarfs for which new spectroscopic observations give a maximum surface rotation rate of 10 km/s. This also leads to low values of the specific angular momentum, much less than expected. How is it possible?