The universe is full of mysteries and mysteries. Millions of objects move around undetected. In fact, there’s no shortage of such objects lurking in our own Milky Way. We know very little about them, but they continue to influence our lives in a number of ways. As efforts to study these objects continue, astronomers have discovered a new object, about 3,000-4,000 light-years away, that is emitting mysterious rays of light. They suspect that the object could be an elusive “black widow”, a rapidly rotating pulsar, or a neutron star, which thrives by slowly consuming its smaller companion star.
Black widow stars are rare because astronomers can only detect about two dozen of them in Galaxy. But researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who found this mysterious object, believe it may be the strangest and strangest black widow pulsar of them all. They named their newest candidate ZTF J1406 + 1222.
The new candidate has the shortest orbital period yet identified, with the pulsar and companion orbiting each other every 62 minutes, the researchers say. This system is unique because it appears to contain a third star that orbits the two inner stars every 10,000 years. more in a statement on the MIT website.
This three-star system is raising questions about how it will form. The MIT The researchers have been trying to put forward a theory of its origin: they feel the system likely arose from a dense constellation of old stars known as a globular cluster. This particular system may have drifted away from the cluster towards the center of the Milky Way.
Lead researcher and physicist Kevin Burdge from MIT’s Department of Physics said: “This system may have been floating in the Milky Way longer than the sun around it.
Their research has been published in the journal Nature. It details how the researchers used a new approach to detect this three-star system. Most black widow binaries are detected through gamma and X-ray radiation emitted by the central pulsar, but the MIT researchers used visible light to detect the system.
