The Black Widows

摘要

New discoveries are shedding light on this mystery, implying that some of these gamma-ray sources are a special type of neutron star, a "black widow pulsar" that vaporizes its companion. Surprisingly, this discovery comes not from the high-energy space telescope that originally detected the sources but from standard ground-based telescopes, which can catch the visible light from the companion star's evaporation. In fact, the evaporation is not just visible, but dramatic — in a few cases amateur-class equipment can record the effects of these cosmic accelerators' death rays.