"Black Widow" Star Devours Its Companion.

• Position: ASTRONOMY

In black widow star systems, a rapidly spinning star, called a pulsar, blasts its orbiting companion with radiation, slowly evaporating it. Like their namesake spiders, the pulsars take advantage of their lower-mass companions before destroying them by harnessing material and energy from the doomed partner stars.

A study published in the journal Nature reports a new candidate black widow star system, named ZTF J1406+1222, in which the stars orbit around each other every 62 minutes--the shortest orbital period observed to date for this type of binary star system.

The new candidate system was found using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) instrument at the California Institute of Technology's Palomar Observatory.

"This 62-minute orbit is remarkable because we don't understand how the stars could get into such a tight orbit," says Kevin Burdge, a postdoctoral scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who performed the research while at tech. 'The process of the pulsar lating its companion should actually drive them apart. This is pushing the boundaries of what we thought possible."

Burdge says that upcoming observations from NASA's Chandra Xray Observatory should help confirm the result. "Our data indicates we are looking at a black widow binary, but it could be something entirely...