The reporter learned from the National Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that new progress has been made in the research of my country's first large-field X-ray astronomical satellite, the "Tianguan" satellite, and has captured a rare X-ray binary system.
The wide-field X-ray telescope equipped by the Tianguan satellite captures short and high-energy X-ray radiation events from a pair of rare celestial bodies in the adjacent galaxy, the small Magellanic Cloud, and uses the rear-separated X-ray telescope it carries. Perform directional observations to obtain more detailed X-ray information during the source burst. This discovery opens up new avenues for exploring the interaction and evolution of massive stars, confirming the satellite's unique ability to capture new X-ray sources that are fleeting in the universe. As the first paper led by the European Space Agency based on the "Tianguan" satellite data, the result was officially released in the "Astrophysics Magazine Express" on February 19, 2025, Beijing time.
This strange combination of celestial bodies contains a large hot star with a mass of more than 10 times the sun, and a dense white dwarf with a mass of equal to the sun. Currently, only a few such systems have been discovered in the scientific community, and this is the first time that scientists can track the entire process of this strange binary system from the sudden outbreak of X-rays to the gradual decline of this kind.
△The Tianguan satellite captures the X-ray flashes emitted by a strange binary system, which consists of a large hot star more than 10 times larger than the sun and a small white dwarf with a mass equivalent to the sun.
△Tianguan satellite art imagination
