Mark Megahan
Ravenous neutron star Swift J1858 is the “Cookie Monster” to astronomers. Massively dense neutron stars “don’t just devour all the gas, dust and debris they pull toward them. Instead, they send it flying into space at high speeds.” That makes them “messy eaters.” One team did the near impossible and pointed ten different telescopes at the same point in space at the same time to capture one amazing composite image.
Neutron Cookie Monster
Neutron stars don’t simply graze on nearby matter, they devour it. When they do, they leave crumbs all over the place like a cosmic Cookie Monster, astrophysicists say.
One team of researchers from 11 different countries pointed ten telescopes at an X-ray binary they like to call Swift J1858. The University of Southampton got to put out the press release because they’re the ones who funded it.
The end result was one of those mesmerizing images you can hang a print of on your wall to impress friends with. It’s also a “never-before-captured space phenomenon.”
Half the serious astronomy gear available was put to good use “including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton satellite, the European Southern Observatory Organization’s Very Large Telescope and the Spanish Gran Telescopio Canarias.” They caught the hungry Cookie Monster in every shade of the spectrum.
“This time we had cosmic luck on our side, as we were able to co-ordinate ten telescopes and point them towards the J1858, all while it was fully active. This allows us to obtain much more information since we can use different techniques at different wavelengths,” explains co-author Dr. Hernández Santisteban from the University of St Andrews.
The thing that makes it a “cosmic cookie monster,” he notes, is the “strong gravitational pull that allows it to gobble up gas from other stars.”
Not quite a black hole
Neutron stars are supermassive objects and when they rotate, they do really freaky things, sending out all sorts of nasty cosmic death rays. They’re almost, but not quite, a black hole. That means things can still escape from their gravity well, as long as the particles are moving pretty close to the speed of light. Neutron stars “don’t just devour all the gas they pull toward them.”
Instead, “they send it flying into space at high speeds.” That’s why, Co-author Nathalie Degenaar from the University of Amsterdam, notes, they call them “stellar cannibals” that are “messy eaters” and “cosmic cookie monsters.”
She says while it seems playful, they take it really seriously. They spent a whole lot of grant money on heavy equipment, some of it off planet. They knew they had to come up with some kind of “significant breakthrough in astrophysics” to justify the price tag.
“Eruptions like this are rare, and each of them is unique. Normally they are heavily obscured by interstellar dust, which makes observing them really difficult.” The great thing about Swift J1858 is that this cookie Monster lives in our galactic neighborhood.
Usually interstellar dust gets in the way of good images but because Swift J1858 is located right on the other side of our galaxy, “the obscuration was small enough to allow for a full multiwavelength study.” As pointed out by the researchers, this Cookie Monster has lot’s of friends. “All disc-accreting astrophysical objects produce powerful disc winds. In compact binaries containing neutron stars or black holes, accretion often takes place during violent outbursts.”
The main disc wind signatures during these eruptions “are blue-shifted X-ray absorption lines, which are preferentially seen in disc-dominated ‘soft states‘. By contrast, optical wind-formed lines have recently been detected in ‘hard states‘, when a hot corona dominates the luminosity.” It looks good, that’s for sure.
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