Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News
A two-faced star just helped weigh an extra-massive pulsar.
The star takes about four hours to orbit its companion, a fast-spinning stellar corpse called a pulsar that’s about 10 light-years from Earth. That means the pair’s orbital dance is tight enough that the star always shows the same face to the pulsar, similar to how the moon is oriented to Earth.
Radiation from the pulsar has fried the near side of the companion star to a scorching 7800° Celsius, Manuel Linares of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona and colleagues report May 23 in the Astrophysical Journal. That’s as hot as an A-type star, which are typically…
The post Two-faced star reveals a pulsar’s surprising bulk appeared first on FeedBox.