Scientists find rare ‘triple black widow’

The rapidly circling stars were found 3k light years away

London,

Scientists have discovered a rare “triple black widow” system — a pair of stars that rapidly circle each other before one is consumed by the other — located some

3,000 light-years away. The star system named “ZTF J1406+1222” has the shortest known orbit of any black widow binary i.e. 62 minutes, according to researchers.

What makes this unique is it contains a third star that circles the central pair every

10,000 years, according to the finding published

May

in the journal Nature on May 4.

A team led by scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US found the stellar oddity, which appears to be a new black widow binary — a rapidly spinning neutron star or pulsar that is circling and slowly consuming a smaller companion star.

The system derives its name from the “black widow” spiders, in which the female eats the male after mating.

Astronomers know of about two dozen black widow binaries in the Milky Way.

The research, which also involves astronomers from the University of Sheffield in the UK, suggests that “ZTF J1406+1222” has the shortest orbital period yet identified, with the pulsar and companion star circling each other every 62 minutes.

The study used HiPERCAM, a highspeed camera developed by researchers at the University of Sheffield that can take more than 1,000 optical images per second, to find the exotic triple black widow.

The discovery has raised questions about how such a system could have formed, with researchers speculating that as with most black widow binaries, the triple system likely arose from a dense constellation of old stars known as a globular cluster. —