The universe is full “accelerators for the poor”As academician Yakiv Zeldovich calls the energetic cosmic phenomenon. We will never be able to reproduce some processes in terrestrial laboratories, including events involving neutron stars. All this can be examined from the outside, and now such observations have brought a new achievement – for the first time, scientists have recorded a jet of matter emanating from a neutron star, the speed of which reaches 40% of the speed of light.

The Compact Array radio telescope array in Australia and the European X-ray satellite Integral (ESA’s joint project with Roscosmos and NASA) helped make the discoveries. Jets and scattering of matter in the process of interacting with the jet from a neutron star can only be seen in these ranges and in the gamma range. Another condition was that the neutron star had a partner; An ordinary star that can collect matter to launch jets.

The gravitational force of neutron stars is second only to black holes. If it is a binary system consisting of a neutron star and an ordinary star, then the matter from the latter (as a rule, it is hydrogen) flows into the neutron star, which are sometimes called stellar cannibals. The concentration and compression of hydrogen on the surface of a neutron star leads to the initiation of a thermonuclear reaction and an explosion that forms a jet – the emission of energy and matter. Along the way, matter from space surrounding the neutron star is drawn into the jet and accelerated by it, where it begins to shine in the X-ray and gamma range.

The problem with observing such events is that jets appear randomly rather than on schedule. Therefore, scientists need to monitor neutron stars for hours and even around the clock, hoping to collect the most complete information about the event. Many factors need to coincide, including the location of the observatory.

An international group of astrophysicists from the University of Warwick (UK), the National Institute of Astrophysics in Palermo (Italy) and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands achieved their goal and managed to photograph the phenomenon in “ideal” detail. scientists reported in the journal Nature Experiments recorded not only the formation process of the jet, but also the capture of the jet of matter from the surrounding space and its acceleration to 35-40% of the speed of light (about 114 thousand km/s).

According to researchers, this is the fastest jet ever observed. Scientists also noted that the thermonuclear explosion that created the jet probably did not destroy the site where it occurred, but simply pulled a mass of material synthesized by the star into the jet. It is therefore clear that similar processes affect both the distribution of heavier elements in the universe and directly the processes of star formation.