A Black Widow Pulsar Is Eating Its Stellar Companion

The PSR B1957+20 pulsar is dancing in a deathly tango with its brown dwarf. And in the end, the pulsar will evaporate the dwarf and eat it up. Living so close to the remains of a supernova is obviously no fun.

The white dwarf in the AE Aquarii system is the first star of its type known to give off pulsar-like pulsations that are powered by its rotation and particle acceleration.
By Casey Reed / NASA (Nasa - White Dwarf Pulses Like a Pulsar) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

It seems like everything can exist in space. Even Black Widows with similar tastes as their Earthly counterparts. In space, black widows are pulsars that have a close stellar partner. And similarly to spider Black Widows they will eventually eat their partner. First, they scorch them with radiation and then eat them up over time.

A team from the Toronto University managed to achieve quite a feat. They observed a black widow pulsar and its victim in one of the most detailed and high-resolution images of astronomy history. Their target is 6000 light years away and the astronomers observed two regions of intense radiation that are about 20 km apart. That is similar to watching a flea on the surface of Pluto.

The PSR B1957+20 is one of the most massive pulsars we know. Its mass is about 1.7 – 2.4 solar masses and is all located in an object just a few dozen kilometers in diameter. On top of that, this insane object rotates about 600 times per second. The partner is a brown dwarf that is less massive than the pulsar but is much larger, about one-third of our Sun.

But this won’t last forever. Eventually, the pulsar will literally evaporate the brown dwarf and eat up its remains. Even know a cloud of gas is being torn out from the brown dwarf. But for us, that was actually pretty lucky as the gas cloud worked as a lens for us and allowed us to observe the two regions of radiation.

Sources:

• http://www.dunlap.utoronto.ca/astronomers-observe-unprecedented-detail-in-pulsar-6500-light-years-from-earth/
• https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05185-y

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