Spider Pulsars Caught Destroying Nearby Stars - Explained - video Dailymotion

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Data from the Chandra X-ray Telescope has revealed spider pulsars, which are a group of dead stars, in globular cluster Omega Centauri "preying' on nearby stars. The Chandra team explains.   Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart

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00:00Music

00:04Visit Chandra's beautiful universe. Omega Centauri

00:08A horde of dead stars

00:12known as spider pulsars are obliterating companion stars within their

00:16reach. Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory

00:20of the globular cluster Omega Centauri are helping astronomers

00:24understand how these spider pulsars prey on nearby stars.

00:28A pulsar is the spinning, dense core that remains

00:32after a massive star collapses into itself. Rapidly

00:36rotating neutron stars can produce beams of radiation.

00:40Like a rotating lighthouse beam, the radiation can be observed as a powerful

00:44pulsing source of radiation, or pulsar.

00:48Some pulsars spin around dozens to hundreds of times per second,

00:52and these are known as millisecond pulsars.

00:56Spider pulsars are a special class of millisecond

01:00pulsars and get their name from the damage they inflict on small

01:04companion stars in orbit around them. Through winds of energetic

01:08particles streaming from their surfaces, the spider pulsars

01:13methodically strip the companion stars of their outer layers.

01:17Astronomers recently discovered 18 millisecond pulsars in

01:21Omega Centauri, located about 17,700 light-years

01:25from Earth, using radio telescopes. A pair of

01:29astronomers from the University of Alberta in Canada then looked at Chandra data

01:33of Omega Centauri to see how many of the millisecond pulsars give off

01:37X-rays. They found 11 millisecond pulsars

01:41emitting X-rays, and five of those were spider pulsars, concentrated near the

01:45center of Omega Centauri. The researchers next

01:49combined the data of Omega Centauri with Chandra observations of

01:53the energetic spider pulsars in 12 other globular clusters.

01:57Spider pulsars are typically separated from their companions by only about

02:011 to 14 times the distance between the Earth and Moon.

02:05This close proximity, cosmically speaking, causes the energetic

02:09particles from the pulsars to be particularly damaging to their

02:13companion stars.

02:17Chandra's sharp X-ray vision is crucial for studying millisecond pulsars

02:21in globular clusters, because they often contain large numbers of X-ray

02:26sources in a small part of the sky, making it difficult to distinguish sources

02:30from each other.

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Spider Pulsars Caught Destroying Nearby Stars - Explained

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