These fast-moving outbursts of material are slightly different from those launched by black holes.
The dense remains of massive stars generate powerful jets of gas and dust that move hundreds of millions of miles per hour, according to research published last week in Nature. When some massive stars die, their remains collapse into neutron stars. These remnants are some the densest objects in the universe alongside black holes, and like their more enigmatic cousins, neutron stars sometimes power jets that launch material out into space.
Neutron stars are “so dense that they can pull material off the surface of a nearby companion star,” said James Miller Jones, an astrophysicist at Curtin University in Australia and co-author of the research, in an ICRAR release. “That gas spirals down onto the surface of that neutron star where it gets very, very hot and dense. Once enough of it builds up nuclear fusion reactions start to happen on the surface.
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