According to a new study, the massively dense remains of a dead star revived for a short period of time after absorbing the energy of its former companion star which is a dying red giant.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) complex gamma-ray lab, aka the Integral lab, caught a strong burst of X-ray glow emanating from the central region of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
The scientists from ESA have reported that the X-ray burst was emitted from the direction of a dead star, which is scientifically called a neutron star.
Shockingly, the dead star had started to absorb the matter of its dying former companion star, now a red giant.
The majority of all the massive stars are becoming neutron stars
After depleting all their resources, massive stars blast as supernovas do but what it remains afterward is gathering together to form neutron stars or black holes.
Neutron stars are massively dense space objects.
Red giants, on the other hand, are also very common but after they die what is left behind forms up white dwarfs which are not very compact in comparison to neutron stars which are considered the densest space object ever discovered.
Scientists discovered a very rare cosmical couple of stars
By now, no more than 10 couples formed by one neutron star and one red giant have been found.
“Integral caught a unique moment in the birth of a rare binary system. The red giant released a sufficiently dense, slow wind to feed its neutron star companion, giving rise to high-energy emission from the dead stellar core for the first time,” admitted Enrico Bozzo, a researcher at the University of Geneva and one of the study’s authors.
The two object are puzzling the scientists. According to Bozzo, the study’s results could mean that either the neutron stars’ magnetic field is not lowering with time or the “neutron star actually formed later in the history of the binary system”.
