Black Widow pulsar
The Black Widow pulsar is an eclipsing binary millisecond pulsar in the Milky Way. Discovered in 1988, it is located roughly away from Earth. It completes rotation period of 1.6074 milliseconds. It orbits with a brown dwarf or super-Jupiter companion with a period of 9.2 hours with an eclipse duration of approximately 20 minutes. When it was discovered, it was the first such pulsar known.
Description
The prevailing theoretical explanation for the system implied that the companion is being destroyed by the strong powerful outflows, or winds, of high-energy particles caused by the neutron star; thus, the sobriquet black widow was applied to the object. Subsequent to this, other objects with similar features have been discovered, and the name has been applied to the class of millisecond pulsars with an ablating companion, as of February 2023 around 41 black widows are known to exist.Later observations of the object showed a bow shock in H-alpha and a smaller-in-extent shock seen in X-rays, indicating a forward velocity of approximately a million kilometers per hour.
In 2010, it was estimated that the neutron star's mass was at least and possibly as high as . In January 2023 the upper limit was revised down to