NASA: A Black Widow Pulsar Consumes Its Mate

NASA and a group of scientists explain the fascinating phenomena wherein a binary star system contains two rapidly spinning neutron stars, called “black widow” or “redback” binaries. The essential features of black widow and redback binaries are that they contain a normal but very low-mass star in close proximity to a millisecond pulsar, which has disastrous consequences for the star.

In this video, the scientists discuss how they discovered these sorts of binary systems and what sorts of research and observations were necessary to figure out what they were looking at.