Researchers got a glimpse of a star that "recently" died and a baby neutron in its place.
The sighting has been called an "astrophysical anomaly." The doomed star left behind a glowing nebula containing the star's core (a neutron star), there is no other known system like this in the Milky Way, a University of Wisconsin-Madison news release reported.
The research team who made the finding believes it could help them gain insight into stellar evolution.
The "anomaly" is called an "X-ray binary," this particular one is named Circinus X-1. It is located 24,000 to 30,000 light years away in the constellation Circinus.
"This particular remnant is only about 2,500 years old, which makes the system the youngest known X-ray binary," Professor Sebastian Heinz, said in the news release. "In terms of a human lifetime, it would be roughly akin to a newborn just a few days old," adds Paul Sell, a former UW-Madison graduate student involved in the study.
When a star explodes as a supernova it leaves behind either a black hole or a neutron star ("a condensed, rapidly-spinning cinder with extraordinary gravitational pull").
"In the Milky Way, there are only about a hundred other neutron stars we are aware of that have held onto their companion stars," Heinz said.
It is even rarer for a neutrons star to be wrapped in the ionized gas cloud left behind by the late star. The nebula is only expected to last for about 100,000 before disappearing.
The fact that we have this remnant along with the neutron star and its companion means we can test all kinds of things," Heinz said. "Our observations solve a number of puzzles both about this object and the way that neutron stars evolve after they are born. For example, the unusual elliptical orbit on which these two stars swing around each other is exactly what you would expect for a very young X-ray binary."
The team believes the Circinus X-1's unique makeup can be attributed to its youth.
