Centaurus X-3, Location, Latest News

Centaurus X-3 Latest News

Scientists have discovered that one of the brightest X-ray pulsars, Centaurus X-3 is gobbling up material through an accretion disk. 

About Centaurus X-3

• It is one of the brightest X-ray pulsars discovered in the constellation Centaurus.
• It is a high-mass X-ray binary (HMXB) where the companion is more than 10 times the Sun’s mass,
• Location: It is located approximately 24,000 light-years from Earth. 
• It contains a disk-fed pulsar with a period of 4.84 seconds that is in a 2.087 day orbit around an O-star companion. 
  • An X-ray binary pulsar consists of a pulsar— a highly magnetised neutron star, and a Sun-like star bound in a gravitational dance.
  • A neutron star is a celestial body with the mass of our sun crunched into a ball the size of Bangalore.
  • In an X-ray binary, the pulsar’s extreme gravity pulls in material ejected by its companion star, and the pulsar starts accreting material from it, shooting out X-rays in the process.

What are Pulsars?

• These are rapidly rotating neutron stars that blast out pulses of radiation at regular intervals ranging from seconds to milliseconds. 
• Pulsars emit radiation from their magnetic poles, known as the primary emission.
• Pulsars have very strong magnetic fields, which funnel jets of particles out along the two magnetic poles. These accelerated particles produce very powerful beams of light.
• Pulsars have been primarily observed at radio wavelengths. 
• Pulsar masses range between 1.18 and 1.97 times that of the Sun, but most pulsars have a mass 1.35 times that of the Sun..

Source: PIB