The record breaker owes its massive success to infalling gas from a companion star.
That dividing line drives the quest to find the most massive neutron stars and determine just how massive they can be, Romani says. “It’s defining the boundary between the visible things in the universe and the stuff that is forever hidden from us inside of a black hole,” he says. “A neutron star that’s on the hairy edge of becoming a black hole — just about heavy enough to collapse — has at its center the very densest material that we can access in the entire visible universe.
PSR J0952-0607 is in the constellation Sextans, just south of Leo. It resides 20,000 light-years from Earth, far above the galaxy’s plane in the Milky Way’s halo. The neutron star emits a pulse of radio waves toward us each time it spins, so astronomers also classify the object as a pulsar. First reported in 2017,That’s why Romani and his colleagues chose to study it — the fast spin led them to suspect that the pulsar might be unusually heavy.
Observing the companion, Romani and his colleagues found that it whips around the pulsar quickly — at about 380 kilometers per second. Using the companion’s speed and its orbital period of about six and a half hours, the team calculated the pulsar’s mass to be more than twice the mass of the sun. That’s a lot heavier than the typical neutron star, which is only about 1.4 times as massive as the sun.
“It’s a terrific study,” says Emmanuel Fonseca, a radio astronomer at West Virginia University in Morgantown who measured the mass of the previous record holder but was not involved in the new work. “It helps nuclear physicists actually constrain the nature of matter within these extreme environments.”
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