Abstract:
Just today, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences released a major result:
Relying on the China Sky Eye FAST, the scientific research team confirmed that the pulsar J0435+3233 is the first three-body pulsar system discovered by humans that is still in the evolutionary stage. It is also the second confirmed three-body pulsar system in the world. The relevant paper was published in "The Astrophysical Journal Letters"
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The three-body system contains three celestial bodies: a millisecond pulsar, a white dwarf, and a solar-like star with a mass close to that of the sun that is still evolving.
The pulsar's rotation period is only 3.2 milliseconds, and it rotates about 312 times per second. It and the white dwarf orbit each other, completing one revolution in 8 days, and the orbit is close to a perfect circle; the third sun-like star orbits further outside.
This pulsar has an abnormal feature: the rotation period increases by 1 nanosecond every year, and the change range is far more than two orders of magnitude higher than that of similar pulsars. It is equivalent to an extremely precise "cosmic clock" that is slowing down abnormally. This is also a key clue that attracts scientific researchers to dig deeper and eventually discover the third companion star.
The object was first discovered by the FAST drift scanning survey in 2020. The subsequent team continued monitoring for five years and obtained a total of 192 sets of observation data. Combined with optical and gamma-ray multi-band telescope data, the three-body structure was completely locked.
Different from the "Three-Body" science fiction work, this real three-star system was born in the same nebula and belongs to the original "triplets" and is still in the process of evolution.
The structure of the three-body pulsar discovered by humans before has been evolved and finalized; and the system discovered this time can help astronomers directly observe the evolution process of the three-star system, providing precious observation samples for stellar dynamics and binary star material exchange theory.
The scientific research team stated that this result once again proves the advantages of FAST's ultra-high sensitivity, which can capture rare dense celestial body systems in the universe and help humans solve the unsolved mysteries of stellar evolution.
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