X-ray Binaries
This short film shows
matter being
transferred from the normal
star in a stellar
binary system
to the degenerate star.
The brightest
X-ray sources in our
Galaxy are X-ray
binaries. These X-ray binaries are two stars which rotate around each other.
One of the two is a normal star; but the other is a collapsed star, such as a
neutron star
or a
black hole,
which has about the same
mass as our Sun but
has shrunk to ten
kilometers or
less in radius. Material is drawn from the normal star and spirals in via an
accretion
disk onto the compact star. Intense X-ray emission is released from the
inner region of the accretion disk where it falls onto the collapsed star.
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