Astrophysicists Discover Neutron Star Jets
Posted on: Monday, 22 May 2006, 18:01 CDT
U.S. scientists say compact jets that shoot matter into space in a continuous stream at near the speed of light might be more commonplace than thought.
The jets have long been thought unique to black holes, but now astrophysicists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have spotted one of the jets around a super-dense dead star -- confirming for the first time that neutron stars, as well as black holes, can produce the jets of matter.
For years, scientists suspected something unique to black holes must be fueling the continuous compact jets because we only saw them coming from black hole systems, said Simone Migliari, an astrophysicist at the University of California-San Diego and lead author of the paper. Now that Spitzer has revealed a steady jet coming from a neutron star in an X-ray binary system, we know that the jets must be fueled by something that both systems share.
A neutron star X-ray binary system occurs when a normal star orbits a dead star so dense all of its atoms have collapsed into neutrons, hence the name neutron star.
The discovery appears in this week's issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Source: United Press International
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