Centaurus X-3:
Scientists have discovered that one of the brightest X-ray pulsars, Centaurus X-3 is gobbling up material through an accretion disk.
- Centaurus X-3 is one of the brightest X-ray pulsars discovered in the constellation Centaurus.
- It is a high-mass X-ray binary (HMXB) where the companion is more than 10 times the Sun’s mass,
- It is located approximately 24,000 light-years from Earth.
- It contains a disk-fed pulsar with a period of 4.84 seconds that is in a 2.087 day orbit around an O-star companion.
- An X-ray binary pulsar consists of a pulsar— a highly magnetised neutron star, and a Sun-like star bound in a gravitational dance.
- A neutron star is a celestial body with the mass of our sun crunched into a ball the size of Bangalore.
- In an X-ray binary, the pulsar’s extreme gravity pulls in material ejected by its companion star, and the pulsar starts accreting material from it, shooting out X-rays in the process.
- Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that blast out pulses of radiation at regular intervals ranging from seconds to milliseconds.
- Pulsars emit radiation from their magnetic poles, known as the primary emission.
- Pulsars have very strong magnetic fields, which funnel jets of particles out along the two magnetic poles. These accelerated particles produce very powerful beams of light.
- Pulsars have been primarily observed at radio wavelengths.
