The ASKAP radio telescope in Australia has spotted a very faint glowing ring in the southern sky, like a soap bubble the size of several full moons. Inside the ring, exactly at the center, shines a tiny point. Usually, such a picture means one thing: a star exploded here, leaving behind an expanding shell and a collapsed core at its heart.
But this pair has a quirk. Next to the central point, there's an ordinary star — a red dwarf, light and cool. Previously, astronomers thought this was a binary system where the compact object was pulling matter from its companion. New distance measurements (the system is only 267 parsecs away, about 870 light-years) show that the X-ray glow is too faint for that scenario. And no pulsations, the rhythmic pulses typical of rapidly spinning neutron stars, are seen in either radio or X-rays.
The authors propose a different explanation. Once, the system hosted two stars: one heavier, about eight solar masses, and a light red dwarf. The massive star exploded, but not as powerfully as usual: the blast was weak, and the bubble shell came out faint. After the explosion, a young neutron star remained, spinning and emitting a stream of charged particles — a so-called pulsar wind. This wind plows into the red dwarf, heating its outer layers, and the system begins to shine in X-rays and gamma rays.
Astronomers call such pairs 'spider' binaries: the neutron star, like a spider, gradually 'devours' its companion, stripping matter from it. But these systems are usually old, millions of years old. Here, the explosion happened very recently by cosmic standards — the shell hasn't dispersed yet. If the conclusion holds, G289.6+5.8 is a newborn 'spider' caught in the first moments of its life.
A red dwarf is so dim that if it replaced the Sun, daytime on Earth would be only slightly brighter than a full moon night.
In Jack McDevitt's novel 'Seeker,' astronomers find an ancient artifact inside a supernova remnant — here, nature itself has created a mystery worthy of a detective story.