Astronomers from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and their team have made an exciting discovery using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), which is the biggest radio telescope in the world.
This new finding has helped to fill a gap in our understanding of what’s called “spider pulsar” evolution.
So what’s a pulsar?
It’s a type of star that spins incredibly fast and regularly, like a cosmic top! They were first discovered back in 1967, and since then, we’ve found about 3,000 of them in the universe.
Some of these pulsars don’t exist alone but are paired with another star, creating what is known as a binary system.
These paired stars can get so close that the pulsar begins to draw material from its companion star.
This keeps the pulsar spinning, but as it takes more and more from its companion, the companion star loses weight, and they start orbiting each other even faster.
However, when the companion star gets too light, the pulsar can’t take any more material from it, and it ends up pushing the companion star away, which slows the pulsar’s spin.
Scientists found these pulsars’ behavior so similar to the way female spiders sometimes eat male spiders that they named them after the redback and black widow spiders.
The process where a redback evolves into a black widow is thought to take hundreds of millions of years. Before now, we could only find pulsars at the beginning (redback) and the end (black widow) of this process but never in the middle.
The problem was that the middle stage, or “intermediate” pulsar, was predicted to have a very short orbital period and be super close to its companion star.
This made it incredibly hard to spot with our current technology.
That’s where the FAST telescope came in. It was able to detect a spider pulsar system with an incredibly short orbital duration of just 53 minutes!
Based on what they observed, the scientists were able to confirm that this system was in the middle of the process from turning from a redback to a black widow.
This discovery not only proves the theory of spider pulsar evolution but also demonstrates the impressive capabilities of the FAST telescope. One of the study’s authors, Jiang Peng of the NAOC, said this discovery filled the gap in our understanding of spider pulsar systems and showed how FAST’s high detection power could help make such rare findings possible.
The discovery is being hailed as a major breakthrough in the field, as it provides new insights into the evolution of spider pulsars.
It’s as if we’ve finally found the missing piece of a cosmic puzzle!
The study was published in Nature.
