Black Widow Pulsar

The Black Widow Pulsar (B1957+20) is an eclipsing binary millisecond pulsar discovered in 1988. It orbits with a brown dwarf companion with a period of 9.2 hours with an eclipse duration of approximately 20 minutes. When it was discovered it was the first such pulsar known. The prevailing theoretical explanation for the system implied that the companion is being destroyed by the gravitational environment (Roche lobe overflow) caused by the neutron star, and so the sobriquet black widow was applied to the object. Subsequent to this, other objects with similar features have been discovered, and the name has been applied to the class of millisecond pulsars with an ablating companion.

Contents

• Nasa a black widow pulsar consumes its mate
• Black widow pulsars the vengeful corpses of stars
• Gallery
• References

Later observations of the object showed a bow shock in H-alpha and a smaller-in-extent shock seen in X-rays (as observed by the Chandra Space Telescope), indicating a forward velocity of approximately a million kilometers per hour.

In 2010 it was estimated that the neutron star’s mass was at least 1.66 M ⊙ , and possibly as high as 2.4 M ⊙ (the latter of which, if true, would surpass PSR J1614–2230 for the title of most massive neutron star yet detected, and place it within range of the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit).