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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00:00Visit Chandra's Beautiful Universe
00:05Omega Centauri
00:08A horde of dead stars known as spider pulsars are obliterating companion stars within their reach.
00:17Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory of the globular cluster Omega Centauri
00:22are helping astronomers understand how these spider pulsars prey on nearby stars.
00:28A pulsar is the spinning, dense core that remains after a massive star collapses into itself.
00:35Rapidly rotating neutron stars can produce beams of radiation.
00:40Like a rotating lighthouse beam, the radiation can be observed as a powerful pulsing source of radiation, or pulsar.
00:48Some pulsars spin around dozens to hundreds of times per second, and these are known as millisecond pulsars.
00:57Spider pulsars are a special class of millisecond pulsars, and get their name from the damage they inflict on small companion stars in orbit around them.
01:07Through winds of energetic particles streaming from their surfaces, the spider pulsars methodically strip the companion stars of their outer layers.
01:16Astronomers recently discovered 18 millisecond pulsars in Omega Centauri, located about 17,700 light-years from Earth, using radio telescopes.
01:28A pair of astronomers from the University of Alberta in Canada then looked at Chandra data of Omega Centauri to see how many of the millisecond pulsars give off x-rays.
01:38They found 11 millisecond pulsars emitting x-rays, and 5 of those were spider pulsars, concentrated near the center of Omega Centauri.
01:48The researchers next combined the data of Omega Centauri with Chandra observations of 26 spider pulsars in 12 other globular clusters.
01:57Spider pulsars are typically separated from their companions by only about 1 to 14 times the distance between Earth and Moon.
02:05This close proximity, cosmically speaking, causes the energetic particles from the pulsars to be particularly damaging to their companion stars.
02:16Chandra's sharp x-ray vision is crucial for studying millisecond pulsars in globular clusters, because they often contain large numbers of x-ray sources in a small part of the sky, making it difficult to distinguish sources from each other.
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