Astronomers have observed the most massive known example of an object called a neutron star, one classified as a 'black widow' that got particularly hefty by gobbling up most of the mass of a stellar companion trapped in an unhappy cosmic marriage.
A spinning neutron star periodically swings its radio and gamma-ray beams past Earth in this artist's concept of a black widow pulsar. The pulsar heats the facing side of its stellar partner to temperatures twice as hot as the sun's surface and slowly evaporates it.
"The heavier the neutron star, the denser the material in its core," said Roger Romani, director of Stanford University's Center for Space Science and Astrophysics and a co-author of the research published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Since we don't yet know how matter works at these densities, the existence of this neutron star is an important probe of these physical extremes," Romani said.
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