SPLAT! STAR THWACKED, GUTS flung into space at 15 per cent of LIGHTSPEED • The Register

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07...15_lightspeed/

In perhaps the most violent punch that has ever been witnessed by humanity, a speeding pulsar has smashed right through a disk of matter bulging from the middle of a hefty star and blown a massive chunk of it guts into interstellar space at a significant fraction of light speed.

That's according to top space boffins peering through the orbiting Chandra X-Ray telescope, who have been observing the vicious drubbing handed to the far-flung massive star B1259, 1,500 parsecs off in the constellation Crux (in the direction of the Southern Cross, that is).

B1259, about thirty times as massive as our own Sun, is spinning very fast and has a big disk of matter bulging out around its middle as a result. It also has an abusive companion, a pulsar – that is an ultradense blob of neutronium left behind after an even bigger star blew up in a supernova. The pulsar travels around the big fellow in a very fast elliptical orbit such that it punches through the disk every 41 months.

The latest punching observed by Chandra has seemingly spattered matter out of the disk with such violence that it is now travelling out into interstellar space at no less than 15 per cent of light speed.

“After this clump of stellar material was knocked out, the pulsar’s wind appears to have accelerated it, almost as if it had a rocket attached,� said astroboffin Oleg Kargaltsev.

“This just shows how powerful the wind blasting off a pulsar can be,� added Kargaltsev's colleague Jeremy Hare. “The pulsar’s wind is so strong that it could ultimately eviscerate the entire disk around its companion star over time.�

On 29/07/2015 1:47 PM, palsing wrote:
Apparently these are different stars.

For B1259, in Crux...

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/si...bmit=submit+id

For MT91 213, in Cygnus...

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/si...bmit=submit+id

\Paul A

It's really weird how there are two such star systems discovered, and
they are discovered within days of each other.

Yousuf Khan

On Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 4:38:20 PM UTC-7, Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 29/07/2015 1:47 PM, palsing wrote:
Apparently these are different stars.

For B1259, in Crux...

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/si...bmit=submit+id

For MT91 213, in Cygnus...

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/si...bmit=submit+id

\Paul A

It's really weird how there are two such star systems discovered, and
they are discovered within days of each other.

Yousuf Khan

I suspect that, if they were looking specifically for this rarity, they would find even more... and I also suspect that the ARE!

Just for note:

On Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 8:11:22 PM UTC-7, palsing wrote:
On Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 4:38:20 PM UTC-7, Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 29/07/2015 1:47 PM, palsing wrote:
Apparently these are different stars.

For B1259, in Crux...

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/si...bmit=submit+id

For MT91 213, in Cygnus...

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/si...bmit=submit+id

\Paul A

It's really weird how there are two such star systems
discovered, and they are discovered within days of
each other.

I suspect that, if they were looking specifically for
this rarity, they would find even more... and I also
suspect that the ARE!

Some gamma ray bursters, for sure.

So, apparently supernovas are NOT the sole source of heavier elements sprayed into interstellar space... Could this "apple peeling" be how a significant percentage of the stuff that the Earth is made from, go there?

Or is this just a baby step to another supernova event?

David A. Smith

As Paul wrote, two different stars. Preprints are at
http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01465
http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07155
and you can easily find the published papers from ADS.

In article ,
dlzc writes:
So, apparently supernovas are NOT the sole source of heavier
elements sprayed into interstellar space...

An interesting thought, but it's not so clear. The neutron stars are
interacting with extended disks above the stellar surfaces, not with
the stellar interiors. There's no reason I see for the disks to have
enhanced heavy element abundances. I haven't seen (and am not
doing!) a calculation, but I'd be surprised if the heavy element
enrichment by this process is more than trivial.

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