{"id":159400,"date":"2023-03-03T01:22:41","date_gmt":"2023-03-03T07:22:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/major-collaboration-reveals-new-insights-on-binary-star-systems"},"modified":"2023-03-03T01:22:41","modified_gmt":"2023-03-03T07:22:41","slug":"major-collaboration-reveals-new-insights-on-binary-star-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/major-collaboration-reveals-new-insights-on-binary-star-systems","title":{"rendered":"Major collaboration reveals new insights on binary star systems"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Researchers from the University of Oxford have contributed to a major international study which has captured a rare and fascinating space phenomenon: binary star systems. The study, \u201cA shared accretion instability for black holes and neutron stars,\u201d has been published in Nature.<\/p>\n

Scientists have long been intrigued by X-ray binary star systems, where two stars orbit around each other with one of the two stars being either a black hole or a neutron<\/a> star. Both black holes<\/a> and neutron stars<\/a> are created in supernova explosions and are very dense\u2014giving them a massive gravitational pull. This makes them capable of capturing the outer layers of the normal star that orbits around it in the binary system, seen as a rotating disk of matter (mimicking a whirlpool) around the black hole\/neutron star.<\/p>\n

According to theoretical calculations, these rotating disks should show a dynamic instability: about once an hour, the inner parts of the disk rapidly fall onto the black hole\/neutron star, after which these inner regions re-fill and the process repeats. Up to now, this violent and extreme process had only been directly observed once, in a black hole binary system. For the first time, it has now been seen in a neutron star binary system, called Swift J1858.6\u20130814. This discovery demonstrates that this instability is a general property of these disks (and not caused by the presence of a black hole).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Researchers from the University of Oxford have contributed to a major international study which has captured a rare and fascinating space phenomenon: binary star systems. The study, \u201cA shared accretion instability for black holes and neutron stars,\u201d has been published in Nature. Scientists have long been intrigued by X-ray binary star systems, where two stars [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}