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back to article Astronomers find first neutron star in Andromeda galaxy

Neutron stars have been found in our own galaxy for decades, but now scientists have spotted the first in our galactic neighbor Andromeda. A neutron star is the remnant of a once-bright star that has since gone supernova and spins rapidly. If an extremely dense remnant encounters another star it sucks off its material, …

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  1. Winkypop Silver badge
    Coat

    "The star spins once every 1.2 seconds and the star it feasts on orbits it every 1.3 days."

    So that's what the Andromeda Strain is.

    4 0 Reply
    1. Captain DaFt
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      Re: "The star spins once every 1.2 seconds and the star it feasts on orbits it every 1.3 days."

      Just the fact that they can tell that much about a stellar pair in another freakin' galaxy just leaves me dumb-founded.

      Now if we just had some way off this rock that didn't take lifetimes to get anywhere near another star, let alone another galaxy.

      20 1 Reply
      1. Mark 85
        Reply Icon

        Re: "The star spins once every 1.2 seconds and the star it feasts on orbits it every 1.3 days."

        Now if we just had some way off this rock that didn't take lifetimes to get anywhere near another star, let alone another galaxy.

        Not to worry. We have our top men working on it. Top, Men.

        9 0 Reply
      2. arctic_haze
        Reply Icon

        Re: "The star spins once every 1.2 seconds and the star it feasts on orbits it every 1.3 days."

        Now if we just had some way off this rock that didn't take lifetimes to get anywhere near another star, let alone another galaxy.

        C'mon this cannot be too difficult. It's not rocket science!

        2 0 Reply
  2. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    "We'll be able to get a lot closer look in about four billion years' time, at which point the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our Milky Way and merge into a new super-galaxy."

    Maybe by then HλLF-LIFE 3 will have been released?

    But seriously, top-notch boffinry. All this data the astroboffins keep accumulating would be a better playground for data scientists to train their algos than my shopping metadata.

    3 1 Reply
  3. Little Mouse
    Thumb Up

    So far away

    My first thought on reading this was that picking out any detail from something so far away must be almost impossible. How could anyone possibly tell whether signals from another galaxy were coming from the same source or not?

    Then I saw the accompanying image.

    Seven shades of awesome. Consider my gast well and truly flabbered!

    7 0 Reply
  4. Timbo

    "We'll be able to get a lot closer look in about four billion years' time, at which point the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our Milky Way and merge into a new super-galaxy."

    Is this a coincidence?, as in approx 4 billions years time, our Sun will apparently swallow up Earth and then collapse and ruminate on what's it's consumed. Maybe merging with Andromeda will provide Sol with some dessert to feast on ;-)

    2 0 Reply
  5. Terry Cloth

    a 'peculiar low-mass X-ray binary pulsar'...

    ... in which the companion star is less massive than our Sun

    Why should that be peculiar? Since the companion's mass is being sucked up by the neutron star, wouldn't all of them (the companions) end up low-mass?

    0 0 Reply
  6. DocJames

    4 billion years: supergalaxy formation

    I'll add it to the calender.

    2 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 4 billion years: supergalaxy formation

      That's a great idea as I'll doubtlessly be running the kids around to basketball games/tournaments and miss it otherwise. I wonder if we can schedule it as a mid-week event. I wouldn't mind them missing a practice for an astronomical event like this.

      0 0 Reply
  7. G R Goslin

    On the grounds of......

    On the grounds that the merging of the two galaxies are bound to have an effect on outr climate, I'm sure it's not too early to start taking migrative measures.

    0 0 Reply

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