Nov. 28, 2006 — Astronomers have found a gigantic cosmic "Rumpelstiltskin" that is spinning light into matter and giving off lighthouse-like pulses of gamma rays.
The bizarre duo responsible for this miraculous feat of physics is a giant blue star and either a black hole or a rapidly spinning neutron star.
Together, the pair is dubbed LS 5039. The blue star is about 20 times the mass of our sun and is in a very close four-day orbital dance with its unseen compact companion.
The two are separated by a distance that ranges from about 20 to 40 million miles — just a fraction of the distance between Earth and the Sun.
The smaller companion (either a black hole or neutron star) had been spotted previously by radio and X-ray telescopes as it spews out jets of near-light-speed particles from its poles.
"It could also be a rapidly rotating, magnetized neutron star like the Crab Pulsar," said Mathieu de Naurois, of the Laboratoire de Physique Nucleaire des Hautes Energies in Paris, France.
The jetting of near-light-speed particles is what creates gamma rays — the most energetic kind of light there is — as the emitted particles slam into each other.
De Naurois is part of the international High Energy Stereoscopic System team which detected LS 5039’s curious telltale gamma ray pattern using a specialized telescope array in Namibia. They reported their discovery in the latest issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
"There are several tens of similar systems in the Milky Way detected primarily (in) X-rays," said Demo Kazanas an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is important because it is detected at photon energies a billion times larger than X-rays. It is also important because it is the first such binary system which shows modulation at these high energies."
It's that modulation, or variation, of the most powerful sort of light in the universe which signals that matter is being made out of light.
"We’re talking about light that’s a trillion times more powerful than the light we see with our eyes," said cosmic gamma ray researcher Dave Thompson, also of NASA/Goddard.
This extremely high energy enables gamma ray photons to do something that lower energy light photons can’t — invoke Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2, and convert light (the "E" part of the equation) into matter (the "m" term).
