New Delhi, October 21: Indian scientists have discovered that Centaurus X-3, one of the brightest X-ray pulsars, is gobbling up material through an accretion disk — a rare behaviour for pulsars of its kind, an official statement said on Wednesday, IANS reported.

Source: IANS via The Freedom Press

The finding was made by researchers at the Raman Research Institute (RRI), an autonomous institution of the Department of Science and Technology, in a study led by Kinjal Roy. The study has implications for developing better-informed models of the system, one of the most widely studied binary pulsars, and will lead to an enhanced understanding of binary pulsars in general, the statement said.

Why this is unusual

Centaurus X-3 is a high-mass X-ray binary about 24,000 light years away, where the companion star is more than 10 times the mass of the Sun. Such systems typically draw material directly from the stellar winds of their companion stars, so evidence of an accretion disk suggests the system operates differently from what is generally expected for binaries of this type, StratNews Global reported.

Source: StratNews Global

An X-ray binary pulsar consists of a highly magnetised neutron star — a body with the mass of the Sun crunched into a ball the size of Bengaluru — and a companion star bound in a gravitational dance. The pulsar's extreme gravity pulls in material ejected by its companion, and the pulsar starts accreting material from it, shooting out X-rays in the process, the Ministry of Science and Technology statement explained.

Because the system is so distant, its surrounding structures cannot be directly resolved. Roy's team instead investigated four secondary emission lines — radiation absorbed and re-emitted by structures around the neutron star — and found their variations were consistent with a structure rotating alongside the pulsar, supporting the presence of the disk, StratNews Global reported.