Is your spidey sense tingling?⁣:

⁣@NASAChandraXRay captured spider pulsars in the Omega Centauri star cluster, located about 17,700 light-years away from Earth. These observations are helping astronomers study why these spider pulsars are preying on nearby stars.⁣

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What are spider pulsars? A group of dead stars known to inflict damage on other small stars that orbit around them. A pulsar is the spinning dense core which remains after a star has collapsed into itself to form a neutron star. Those neutron stars are rapidly rotating and produce beams of radiation. This causes the outer layers of companion stars to be stripped away due to winds of energetic particles that are flowing from the pulsar stars. ⁣

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Image description: Tiny white stars dot the blackness of space, many appearing to glow with a white or hot pink aura. Like other globular clusters, this conglomeration, named Omega Centauri, is more densely packed near the center. ⁣

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Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA; IR:NASA/JPL/Caltech; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk⁣

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01 December 2023