Mysterious object attracts attention

Data from the MeerKAT radio telescope reveal an object at the boundary between a black hole and a neutron star. An artist's impression of the newly discovered system, assuming that the massive companion of the radio pulsar (bright blue star in the background) is a black hole (foreground). Both objects are 8 million kilometres apart and orbit each other every 7 days. MPIfR; Daniëlle Futselaar (artsource.nl) When astronomers cannot explain something directly, it often becomes really exciting. An international team led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and with the participation of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics has now discovered a mysterious tandem that has never been observed before: a system consisting of a neutron star and an object that, at first glance, should not even exist. But there is a hot lead. Researchers from the international collaboration "Transients and Pulsars with MeerKAT" (Trapum) have discovered a new system of two orbiting objects located in the globular cluster NGC 1851 in the southern constellation Columba (Dove).