X-Ray Binary

How a companion can change a star's fate. In astronomy, a star's initial mass determines its ultimate outcome in life. Unless, that is, a stellar companion alters the deal..

Astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have observed a neutron-star jet with an S shape for the first time. The post Neutron-star jet sprays like a garden sprinkler first appeared on EarthSky.

Cygnus X-3, an X-ray binary system located some 7,400 parsecs (24,136 light-years) in the constellation of Cygnus, represents a class of ultraluminous X-ray sources.

The X-ray-emitting binary system Cygnus X-3 features a massive Wolf-Rayet star donating matter to a compact object, probably a black hole.

It's 33 times more massive than our Sun.

A black hole weighing as much as 33 suns lurks a mere 2,000 light-years away from our solar system

MIT astronomers mapped the "disk winds" associated with the accretion disk around Hercules X-1, a system in which a neutron star is drawing material away from a sun-like star. The findings may offer clues to how supermassive black holes shape entire galaxies.

An accretion disk is a colossal whirlpool of gas and dust that gathers around a black hole or a neutron star like cotton candy as it pulls in material from a nearby star. As the disk spins, it whips up powerful winds that push and pull on the sprawling, rotating plasma. These massive outflows can affect the surroundings of black holes by heating and blowing away the gas and dust around them.

Some years back, I reminisced in these pages about reading Poul Anderson's World Without Stars, an intriguing tale first published in 1966 about a starship in intergalactic space that was studying a civilization for whom the word 'isolation' must have taken on utterly new meaning. Imagine a star system tens of th

The discovery of a so-called monster black hole that has about 12 times the mass of the sun is detailed in a new Astrophysical Journalresearch submission, whose lead author is Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti, a physics professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).

Using the most powerful telescopes on Earth and in space, a team of astronomers has found for the first time blasts of hot, warm and cold winds from a neutron star whilst it consumes matter from a nearby star. The discovery provides new insight into the behaviors of some of the most extreme objects in the universe.

To discover such an invisible black hole, the team of scientists had to combine two different types of observations over several years

Anthocyanins protect seeds in space

With the observational data of the Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT), the first X-ray astronomical satellite of China, Dr. Ding Guoqiang from the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with his collaborators, investigated the hard X-ray tail of neutron star low-mass X-ray binaries (NS-LMXBs). Their results were published in The Astrophysical Journal on June 12.

Dr. Varsha Ramachandran from the Center for Astronomy of Heidelberg University (ZAH) and her colleagues uncovered the first "stripped" star of intermediate-mass. This discovery marks a missing link in our picture of stellar evolution toward systems with merging neutron stars, which are crucial to our understanding of the origin of heavy elements, such as silver and gold. Dr. Ramachandran is a postdoc in the…

Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), a team of Chinese astronomers has detected a new millisecond pulsar in the globular cluster Messier 53. The finding is reported in a research paper published June 16 on the pre-print server arXiv.

Using the Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT) and the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), astronomers from China and India have observed two X-ray binaries known as GX 339−4 and EXO 1846−031. Results of the observational campaign, published May 29 on the arXiv pre-print repository, reveal essential information regarding the evolution of quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) identified in these…

Emily Moravec is a postdoctoral researcher at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Science and a support scientist at the Czech node of the European ALMA Regional Center. She is a radio astronomer and her research interests are active galactic nuclei (AGN), radio galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the evoluti

Using the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) onboard the International Space Station (ISS), an international team of astronomers has detected millihertz quasi-periodic oscillations from a low-mass X-ray binary known as 4U 1730–22. The finding was reported in a paper published March 29 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

These odd binary systems go through multiple phases.