Astronomers have reported in a new study that the heaviest neutron star ever known has a mass of 2.35 that of the Sun and spins 707 times per second that it consumes its much smaller stellar companion, gaining the nickname Black Widow. As a result, it has become the largest neutron star and one of the fastest spinning neutron stars in the Milky Way.
According to Astronomy magazine, the fastest celestial object known as PSR J1748-2446 spins at 716 times per second, just slightly faster than the heaviest neutron star.
PSR J0952-0607: The Heaviest Known Neutron Star in Milky Way
In the study titled "PSR J0952-0607: The Fastest and Heaviest Known Galactic Neutron Star," published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers led by astrophysicist Roger Romani of Stanford University reported that the Black Widow pulsar has just become more interested after discovering that it is more than twice the mass of the Sun.
Scientists have already shown interest in the neutron star PSR J0952-0607 for being a pulsar, which is a neutron star that spins so fast that jets of radiation are emitted from its poles as it spins.
Science Alert reported that aside from being the second-fastest pulsar in the galaxy, it is dubbed a Black Widow pulsar because it pulls material away from the companion star that orbits closely to it and makes it spin even faster.
Romani and his colleagues from other institutions wanted to investigate PSR J0952-0607 further and see how its fits in the timeline of its companion star being gobbled until it is less than 10% of the Sun. They calculated that the pulsar has become 2.35 times more massive than the Sun after slurping up an entire Sun's worth of matter from its binary companion.
"This provides some of the strongest constraints on the property of matter at several times the density seen in atomic nuclei. Indeed, many otherwise popular models of dense-matter physics are excluded by this result," Romani explained in the news release via the University of California Berkeley's publication.
How Solitary Millisecond Pulsars Are Formed
The team explained that the Black Widow pulsar shows that isolated pulsars without any stellar companions can have millisecond rotation rates, wherein the fast spinning rate will remain for quite some time after it has gobbled up its companion.
ABP Live reported that as it evolves to become a red giant, its material spills over to the neutron star and spins it up, where the neutron star becomes incredibly energized, and the wind of particles starts to come out.
That wind will hit another donor star that will strip off its material and slowly decreases as more time passes and disappear altogether, co-author Alex Filippenko from UC Berkeley said in the news release.
Ultimately, that is how a lone millisecond pulsar is formed. That means these celestial bodies were not alone, to begin with, as they started as binary pairs that gradually evaporated and became solitary over time.
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