Scientists have discovered something amazing.
In a cluster of some of the most massive and luminous stars in our galaxy, about 5,000 light years from Earth, astronomers detected particles being accelerated by a rapidly rotating neutron star as it passed by the massive star it orbits only once every 50 years.
The discovery is extremely rare, according to University of Delaware astrophysicist Jamie Holder and doctoral student Tyler Williamson, who were part of the international team that documented the occurrence.
Holder called this eccentric pair of gravitationally linked stars a “gamma-ray binary system” and likened the once-in-a-lifetime event to the arrival of Halley’s comet or last year’s U.S. solar eclipse.
Massive stars are among the brightest stars in our galaxy. Neutron stars are extremely dense and energetic stars that result when a massive star explodes.
This binary system is a massive star with a neutron star orbiting around it. Of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy, less than 10 are known to be this type of system.
Even fewer—only two systems, including this one—are known to have an identified neutron star, or pulsar, that emits pulses of radio waves that scientists can measure. This is important because it tells astronomers very accurately how much energy is available to accelerate particles, something scientists know little about.
“You couldn’t ask for a better natural laboratory to study particle acceleration in a continually changing environment – at energies far beyond anything we can produce on the Earth,” said Holder, a professor in UD’s Department of Physics and Astronomy.
The project was led by a team of scientists, including Holder and Williamson, using the VERITAS telescope array at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona, in collaboration with scientists using the MAGIC telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory located in La Palma, an island of the Canary Islands, Spain. (VERITAS stands for Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System and MAGIC stands for Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov telescopes.)
Filed Under: Aerospace + defense