This artist’s impression depicts how nuclear explosions on a neutron star feed the jets blasting off from its magnetic polar regions. In the foreground, at the center right, there is a very bright white ball, representing the neutron star. White/purple filaments are streaming out from its polar region. The ball is surrounded by a hazy white larger sphere, the corona, and further out by a disk with concentric bands of different colors, going from white in the inner disk to orange in the middle and to red-magenta in the outer region. An orange band connects the outer part of the disk to a large yellow-orange-red section of a sphere in the top left corner. This represents the star companion of the neutron star, that is feeding the disk around the bright white spherical body. Credit: Danielle Futselaar and Nathalie Degenaar, Anton Pannekoek Institute, University of Amsterdam
Astronomers have successfully measured the velocity of rapidly moving jets in space for the first time, a critical factor in the formation of stars and the dispersal of essential life-building elements.
Astronomers have, for the first time, measured the speed of high-velocity jets in space, playing a pivotal role in star formation and the distribution of life-essential elements.
The jets of matter, expelled by stars deemed ‘cosmic cannibals’, were measured to travel at over one-third of the speed of light – thanks to a groundbreaking new experiment published in Nature.
The study sheds new light on these violent processes, making clever use of runaway nuclear explosions on the surface of stars.
Co-Author Jakob van den Eijnden, Warwick Prize Fellow at the Department of Physics,
” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”}]” tabindex=”0″ role=”link”>University of Warwick, said: “The explosions occurred on neutron stars, which are incredibly dense and notorious for their enormous gravitational pull that makes them swallow gas from their surroundings – a gravitational pull that is only surpassed by black holes.
Detailed Mechanism of Jet Formation
“The material, mostly hydrogen from a nearby star that orbits around, swirls towards the collapsed star, falling like snow across its surface. As more and more material rains down, the gravitational field compresses it until a runaway nuclear explosion is initiated. This explosion impacts the jets, that are also shot out from the infalling material and eject particles into space at very high speed.”
The team devised a way of measuring the speed and properties of the jets by comparing X-ray and radio signals picked up by the Australia Telescope Compact Array (owned and operated by
” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”}]” tabindex=”0″ role=”link”>European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Integral satellite.
Co-Author Thomas Russell, National Institute for Astrophysics, INAF, Palermo, Italy, said: “This gave us a perfect experiment. We had a very brief short-lived impulse of extra material that gets shot into the jet and that we can track as it moves down the jet to learn about its speed.”
This artistic animation illustrates how nuclear explosions on a DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07133-5