Around 13,000 light-years from Earth lies an unusual binary star system, known as BP Crucis. It contains a blue hypergiant star roughly 60 times larger than the sun, dubbed Wray 977, alongside a neutron star — the undead and ultradense remains of a star that exploded via a supernova — that astronomers have labeled GX 301-2.
However, unlike most other known pulsars, GX 301-2 also emits frequent X-ray flares (separate from the regular beams), which cause it to shine much brighter at repeated intervals. And, until now, researchers were unsure why.
New observations reveal that GX 301-2 flares up when it passes through the stellar wind plume ejected by Wray 77. This animation shows how the plasma swirls around and interacts with the wobbling neutron star. (Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Laboratory)
This is the first time that researchers have ever detected this type of stellar material interacting with a neutron star, or with any other similar stellar remnant, opening the door to studying similar systems in the future.
Whoever smelt it … explodes?
All stars that actively burn via nuclear fusion release streams of radiation and charged particles known as stellar wind. The sun emits such a stream, known as the solar wind, which can trigger vibrant aurora displays near Earth's poles.
GX 301-2 circles Wray 977 every 41.5 days and experiences its X-ray flares when it reaches its closest and farthest points from its partner, with the strongest flares occurring at its closest point. As a result, researchers had long suspected that the flares occurred when the neutron star passed through the stellar wind plume. However, they had no way of proving this without more evidence.
XRISM was able to capture detailed spectra of GX 301-2 and Wray 77's plasma plume, allowing the researchers to accurately simulate how the stellar wind material interacted with the neutron star. (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, JAXA/NASA, Rahin et al. 2026)"We could see how the dense stream of plasma acts very close to the neutron star," study co-author Nazma Islam, an astronomer at the Manipal Centre for Natural Sciences in India and formerly a researcher at UMBC and NASA Goddard, said in the statement. "It was clear that these observations were groundbreaking, but at the same time this meant the analysis had to be especially detailed."
RELATED STORIESUsing this data, the researchers could simulate exactly how the plasma fell onto and swirled around the passing neutron star. When enough stellar material has accumulated on its surface, the stellar zombie explodes, unleashing the bright flashes we can detect on Earth.
"The BP Crucis system is an ideal laboratory for studying wind-fed pulsar accretion," Brian Williams, XRISM project scientist at NASA Goddard, said in the statement, and XRISM is "an ideal instrument for advancing our understanding of the processes involved."
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