MIT Researchers Discover A Rare ¡®Black Widow¡¯ Pulsar System In The Milky Way

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have stumbled across a new object, roughly 3,000 to 4,000 light-years away, throwing out mysterious flashes of light.

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According to researchers, they feel it could be a ¡®black widow¡¯ star -- a rapidly spinning pulsar or a neutron star that grows by slowly consuming its smaller companion star.

Black widow stars are a rare phenomenon as only about two dozen of them have been detected in the Milky Way and researchers claim that this one -- dubbed ZTF J1406+1222 -- is the most bizarre of them all.

To discover this new system, they used a novel approach using visible light to detect the system as opposed to using the conventional gamma and X-ray radiation emitted by the central pulsar.

According to the researchers, the new candidate has the shortest orbital period yet identified with the pulsar and companion star circling each other every 62 minutes. The system is touted to be unique as these stars appear to be hosting a third star that¡¯s orbiting around the two inner stars every 10,000 years.

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Researchers are also trying to decipher the mystery of its formation. They theorise that the system likely arose from a dense constellation of old stars known as a globular cluster. The system may have drifted away from the cluster towards the centre of the Milky Way.

According to lead researcher and physicist, Kevin Burdge from MIT¡¯s Department of Physics, the system could probably been floating in the Milky Way longer than our Sun.

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