A new study, presented at the virtual American Astronomical Society conference on Monday, details the extreme outburst of SAX J1808.4-3658 (let's call it SAX), an accreting neutron star approximately 11,000 light-years from Earth that spins unfathomably fast, making 401 rotations every second.
"Neutron stars are so dense that if you cupped your hands together and filled them with neutron star material, on Earth you would be holding something that weighs about five Mount Everests," says Adelle Goodwin, doctoral candidate at Monash University, Australia and lead author on the new paper.
These types of pulsars are in orbit with a "normal" star (like our sun) and because of their huge gravity, they siphon off material from the star over "months to years", according to Goodwin.
Catching a star in the act of outburst, or "powering up" as Goodwin calls it, is incredibly rare but the team knew an outburst was coming in 2019 thanks to previous analysis of SAX, which meant they were able to focus various instruments on the star that observe it in different wavelengths of light. .
"What we saw was the accreting pulsar transitioning into the outburst state, and we were watching with seven telescopes for the whole process," says Goodwin.
"This powering up process took much longer than the theory suggests it should," says Goodwin.
"You could say it's my favorite accreting neutron star system," she says.
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