Three members of GW’s physics department are spreading the word on a phenomenon happening 7,500 light years away.
Oleg Kargaltsev, an assistant professor of astrophysics, Jeremy Hare, a graduate student studying nuclear physics and Blagoy Rangelov, a postdoctoral fellow in the department, joined researchers from Pennsylvania State University and the University of Florida to publish an article in “The Astrophysical Journal” about a star that reportedly “punched a hole” in a gas disk near another star, according to a release published Wednesday.
A rotating star about 7,500 light years away from Earth, called a pulsar, caused a puncture in a gas disk located close to a nearby star, called its companion star. That hole forced a fragment of the disk to launch away from the two-star system at a rate of about 4 million miles per hour, the release said.
The pulsar, which is smaller than its neighbor star – which is roughly 30 times the size of the sun – is what’s left of a star that underwent a “supernova explosion,” or died out. The mass rotates 20 times per second and generates winds around it that near the speed of light.
The fragment that floated away from the stars is about 100 times larger than the size of the solar system, but is relatively flat, the release said. The gas fragment’s mass is about equal to the mass of all the earth’s water.
“After this clump of stellar material was knocked out, the pulsar’s wind appears to have accelerated it, almost as if it had a rocket attached,” Kargaltsev said in the release.
The group of physicists have observed the stars and the fragment of the gas disk three times since 2011. The most recent view occurred in February 2014, when the speed of the fragment reached about 15 percent of the speed of light.
Rangelov said in an email that the researchers are continuing to watch the system and has scheduled two more observations of the stars over the next two years.
“The binary system is very unique and definitely worth monitoring,” he said. “Of particular interest is, of course, the fast-moving clump that is seen in X-rays.”
NASA has given the researchers the chance to look at this system with its Chandra X-ray Observatory, which launched into space in 1999 as the organization’s “flagship mission for X-ray astronomy,” according to its website.
“With the additional observations from Chandra we will continue to trace the movement of the clump and study its X-ray properties,” Rangelov said. “This is a unique event that gives us the opportunity to gain rare insight into the physics of stellar disks and pulsar winds.”
