‘Black Widow’ star found 3000 light years away from Earth, know about it

Our universe is full of mysteries, where millions of objects are moving. There are many such things in our galaxy, which are hidden. We know about very little of them. However, they affect our lives in some way or the other. Efforts have been made to study them. Astronomers have detected one such object, which is about 3,000 to 4,000 light-years away from Earth. It emits a mysterious light. Scientists believe that this thing could be a ‘black widow’ star, which could be a fast rotating pulsar or neutron star. It is such a star, which grows slowly by eating its smaller and companion star.

Black Widow stars are quite rare. Astronomers have been able to detect only two dozen such stars in the Milky Way, ie our galaxy. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have detected this new black widow star. They believe it to be the strangest and unique Black Widow pulsar of all those Black Widow stars. It has been named ZTF J1406+1222.

Researchers have said that the shortest orbital period of this star has also been identified. This Black Widow star and its companion star orbit each other every 62 minutes. The system is unique in that it hosts a third star, which orbits its two inner stars every 10,000 years.

This three-star system raises the question of how it all came to be. Researchers at MIT think the system may have originated from a dense constellation of older stars known as globular clusters. It is possible that this particular system has moved away from its cluster towards the distant galaxy.

Principal researcher and physicist Kevin Burge of MIT’s Department of Physics said that perhaps this system is present in our galaxy even before the Sun. This study has been published in the journal Nature. Researchers adopted a new method to detect this triple star system. He used visible light for this.