Tag Archive for 'X-ray binary'

This artist’s impression shows a field of Population III stars as they would have appeared a mere 100 million years after the Big Bang. Image credit: NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / J. da Silva / Spaceengine.

Cosmological Radio Signal Will Help Astronomers Detect Universe’s First-Generation Stars

Jun 20, 2025 by News Staff

The first generation of stars (Population III) must have formed from the unenriched gas that permeated the infant Universe. These stars produced the first...

An artist’s depiction of the X-ray binary system 4U 1820-30 in the core of the globular cluster NGC 6624. Image credit: NASA.

NICER X-ray Telescope Discovers Fast-Spinning Neutron Star

Oct 29, 2024 by Enrico de Lazaro

A neutron star in the X-ray binary system 4U 1820-30 spins 716 times per second, making it one of the fastest-spinning objects ever observed, according...

An artist’s impression of V404 Cygni: the central black hole (black dot) is in the process of consuming a nearby star (orange body at left), while a second star (upper white flash) orbits at a much farther distance. Image credit: Jorge Lugo.

Black Hole-Hosting Binary V404 Cygni is Actually Part of Triple System, Astrophysicists Say

Oct 24, 2024 by News Staff

The well-studied V404 Cygni, an X-ray binary hosting a low-mass black hole, is part of a wide hierarchical triple with a tertiary companion at least 3,500...

Halo around Cygnus X-3. Image credit: NASA.

IXPE Discovers New Ultra-Luminous X-ray Source in Milky Way

Jun 25, 2024 by News Staff

Cygnus X-3, an X-ray binary system located some 7,400 parsecs (24,136 light-years) in the constellation of Cygnus, represents a class of ultra-luminous...

Kosec et al. mapped the winds associated with the accretion disk around Hercules X-1, a binary system located 6,600 parsecs (21,526 light-years) away in the constellation of Hercules. Image credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT / D. Klochkov, ESA.

Astronomers Map Colossal ‘Disk Winds’ in Hercules X-1

Apr 12, 2023 by News Staff

Hercules X-1 is an X-ray binary system in which a neutron star is drawing material away from a Sun-like star. This neutron star’s accretion disk is unique...

An artist’s concept of the Gaia BH1 binary system. Image credit: International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / J. da Silva / Spaceengine / M. Zamani.

Dormant Stellar-Mass Black Hole Detected 1,600 Light-Years Away

Nov 4, 2022 by News Staff

Gaia BH1 has a mass of 9.62 times the mass of the Sun and is orbited by a bright Sun-like star at about the same distance as our planet orbits the Sun....

An artist’s impression of a black hole X-ray binary. Image credit: Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias.

NICER Detects Echoes from Eight Black Hole X-Ray Binaries

May 2, 2022 by News Staff

As a stellar-mass black hole pulls in gas and dust from an orbiting star, it can give off spectacular bursts of X-rays that bounce and echo off the inspiraling...

This composite image features a spectacular set of eight separate concentric rings around a black hole in the V404 Cygni binary system, captured using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. The image also contains optical data from the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii that show the stars in the field of view. Image credit: NASA / CXC / University of Wisconsin-Madison / Heinz et al. / Pan-STARRS.

Astronomers Spot Giant X-Ray Rings around Stellar-Mass Black Hole

Aug 9, 2021 by News Staff

Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have detected a set of eight X-ray rings around a low-mass black...

An artist’s impression of the Cygnus X-1 binary system. Image credit: International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.

Cygnus X-1’s Stellar-Mass Black Hole is More Massive than Astronomers Thought

Feb 19, 2021 by News Staff

A black hole in the Cygnus X-1 binary system is so massive that it challenges current stellar evolution models. An artist’s impression of the Cygnus...

An artist’s impression of a stellar-mass black hole surrounded by a disk of gas and plasma gravitationally pulled from a close binary star companion. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M. Weiss.

Astrophysicists Suggest New Way to Detect Stellar-Mass Black Holes

Sep 22, 2020 by Sergio Prostak

An analysis of archival X-ray data from NASA’s Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer has revealed a clear separation between the characteristics of stellar-mass...

This image from the eROSITA X-ray telescope shows the energetic Universe. As eROSITA scans the sky, the energy of the collected photons is measured with an accuracy ranging from 2% - 6%. To generate this image, in which the whole sky is projected onto an ellipse (so-called Aitoff projection) with the center of the Milky Way in the middle and the body of our Galaxy running horizontally, photons have been color-coded according to their energy (red for energies 0.3-0.6 keV, green for 0.6-1 keV, blue for 1-2.3 keV). The red diffuse glow away from the galactic plane is the emission of the hot gas in the vicinity of the Solar System (the Local Bubble). Along the plane itself, dust and gas absorb the lowest energy X-ray photons, so that only high-energy emitting sources can be seen, and their color appears blue in the image. The hotter gas close to the Galactic center, shown in green and yellow, carries imprinted the history of the most energetic processes in the life of the Milky Way, such as supernova explosions, driving fountains of gas out of the plane, and, possibly, past outburst from the now dormant supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Piercing through this turbulent, hot diffuse medium, are hundreds of thousands of X-ray sources, which appear mostly white in the image, and uniformly distributed over the sky. Among them, distant active galactic nuclei are visible as point sources, while clusters of galaxies reveal themselves as extended X-ray nebulosities. In total, about one million X-ray sources have been detected in this image. Image credit: Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner & the eSASS team / Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics / Eugene Churazov & Marat Gilfanov, IKI.

eROSITA X-Ray Telescope Captures Hot, Energetic Universe

Jun 19, 2020 by News Staff

A new all-sky image from the eROSITA X-ray telescope onboard the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) space observatory contains over one million objects, about...

An artist’s impression of an ultraluminous X-ray pulsar. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Astronomers Find Ultraluminous X-Ray Pulsar in Magellanic Bridge

Jun 8, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Astronomers using ISRO’s AstroSat space observatory have detected a very rare ultraluminous X-ray source in the Magellanic Bridge, a 43,000-light-year-long...

Chandra Catches Relativistic Jets from Stellar-Mass Black Hole

Jun 2, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have observed a pair of relativistic jets blasting away from a black hole in the binary system MAXI...

This image shows TYC 8332-2529-1. Image credit: Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg / SIMBAD / DECaPS.

MeerKAT Spots Huge Radio Flare from Binary System

Nov 20, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using the MeerKAT telescope at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory have spotted an object which rapidly brightened by more than a...

10,000 Stellar-Mass Black Holes Exist in Milky Way’s Central Region, Astronomers Say

Apr 5, 2018 by News Staff

Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have discovered what they believe are 12 stellar-mass black holes gathered around Sagittarius A*,...

An artist’s impression of a white dwarf star (left) in orbit around a black hole and so close that much of its material is being pulled away. There is a hotspot where the gas from the white dwarf hits the disc of matter swirling around the black hole. The black hole itself is surrounded by a cloud of ionized gas, which contains large amounts of oxygen. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M. Weiss.

Astronomers Find Record-Breaking White-Dwarf-Black-Hole Binary in Globular Cluster 47 Tucanae

Mar 14, 2017 by News Staff

Using data from the Australia Telescope Compact Array, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and NuSTAR telescope, a team of astronomers has found evidence...

X-ray evidence from NASA’s Chandra Observatory suggests that a clump of stellar material has been jettisoned away from the binary system B1259 at incredibly high speeds. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M.Weiss.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory Zooms in on Violent Binary Star System

Jul 24, 2015 by News Staff

X-rays from NASA’s Chandra Observatory reveal that a fast-moving pulsar in orbit around a massive star punched a hole in a circumstellar disk of material...

A set of four rings around Circinus X-1 can be seen in this composite image where X-rays from Chandra are red, green, and blue corresponding to low, medium, and high-energy X-rays respectively, which have been combined with a view in visible light from the Digitized Sky Survey. The sharp edges are caused by the large size of the X-ray rings compared to the relatively small field-of-view of the Chandra detectors, providing only partial coverage. Image credit: NASA / CXC / University of Wisconsin-Madison / S. Heinz et al / DSS.

Circinus X-1: Astronomers Discover X-ray Rings around Neutron Star

Jun 24, 2015 by News Staff

Astronomers using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton telescope have discovered a bright X-ray light echo in the form of...

This composite image shows the X-ray binary Circinus X-1. Image credit: X-ray – NASA / CXC / University of Wisconsin-Madison / S.Heinz et al; optical - DSS; radio – CSIRO / ATNF / ATCA.

Chandra Discovers Youngest X-ray Binary in Milky Way

Dec 5, 2013 by News Staff

Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have reported the discovery of the youngest X-ray binary ever found in our Milky Way Galaxy. This...