Pulsar Violently Rips Hole In Unassuming Companion Star’s Disc

The pulsar-star system dubbed PSR B1259-63/LS 2883 – or B1259 for short – packs a star that is about 30 times as massive as our Sunday.

After analyzing three separate Chandra X-ray observations taken between 2011 and 2014, researchers came to the conclusion that the pulsar, traveling its elliptical orbit lasting 41 months, has collided with the disk and knocked out a clump of debris.

The location of the neutron star has been determined with the help of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which has also estimated that the pulsar belongs to the star system called B1259. This pulsar emits pulses as it spins 20 times a second, creating a strong energetic wind of high-speed particles moving at the speed of light.

A newly discovered pulsar-star binary has insight into how powerful can winds generated by pulsar’s rotation and intense magnetic field can be. “The pulsar’s wind is so strong that it could ultimately eviscerate the entire disk around its companion star over time”, according to Oleg Kargaltsev from George Washington University. The companion star is spinning off a large disc of material.

George Pavlov, from Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania, noted that the two objects is in a weird phenomenon in the universe and it gives them a chance to “witness something special”.

The latest punching observed by Chandra has seemingly spattered matter out of the disk with such violence that it is now travelling out into interstellar space at no less than 15 per cent of light speed.

The violent material surrounding the star is large enough to contain hundreds of Solar system in it, but it is extremely thin and only contains material equivalent to our oceans. The components will then move on to evolve as single stars, just like our own Solar System.

The experts observed the B1259 for three times through the Chandra observatory from December 2011 to February 2014. At first sighting, the clump was registered moving at about 7 percent the speed of light, but other observations made by astronomers concluded that the debris has accelerated to 15 percent the speed of light between the second and third observations. “As the pulsar moved through the disk, it appears that it punched a clump of material out and flung it away into space”, said Dr Pavlov, who is the first author of a paper published online in the Astrophysical Journal (arXiv.org preprint).

More observations of B1259 are planned for 2016 to see how the binary star system has evolved. The astronomers interpreted the feature as a clump of plasma released from the binary as initiated by the interaction of the pulsar with the decretion disk of the O-star located around the periastron passage.