"China Sky Eye" detects new phenomenon of "Black Widow" pulsar

　　"China Sky Eye" detects new phenomenon of "Black Widow" pulsar

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　　Science and Technology Daily (Ke Shiyu reporter He Xinghui) Recently, Chinese researchers used the "Chinese Sky Eye" to detect the extreme turbulence of plasma in a dense binary system for the first time, providing new clues for the occultation mechanism of the "Black Widow" pulsar .

The related research was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, an international academic journal for astronomy.

　　Millisecond pulsars are a class of fast-spinning neutron stars whose rotation period is only a few milliseconds.

There is a special type of millisecond pulsar, a dense binary system consisting of a millisecond pulsar and a low-mass star. Astronomers dub them "black widow" pulsars because the companion star is being eaten away by the pulsar's intense radiation.

　　Bai Juntao, Professor Zhi Qijun, graduate students of the Guizhou Provincial Key Laboratory of Radio Astronomy Data Processing, Guizhou Normal University, and Dr. Dai Shi, from the University of Western Sydney, based on the observation of "China Sky Eye", cooperated with the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Peking University. Researchers from other units have conducted in-depth research on the occultation phenomenon of the "Black Widow" pulsar B1957+20, and discovered a new phenomenon of occultation that was not observed before the "Black Widow" pulsar and revealed its physical mechanism.

　　Using the ultra-high-sensitivity observation data of the "China Sky Eye", the researchers detected the radio pulse scattering phenomenon near the eclipse area of ​​the "Black Widow" pulsar B1957+20 for the first time, and found that the deeper the eclipse center, the pulsar radiated out The wider the radio pulse profile becomes, the stronger the scattering, up to 0.2 ms.

　　The study shows that this strong scattering is caused by the multi-path propagation effect, and uses the extreme turbulence of the plasma to explain this effect self-consistently, and gives the reason for the existence of extreme turbulence in the occultation material of the "Black Widow" pulsar. The first direct evidence that this plasma turbulence may be an important mechanism for the masking of high-frequency radio radiation, the findings also have important implications for the origin of the pulse broadening observed in FRBs.