NASA-JAXA XRISM mission sees pulsar gathering companion's stellar wind

Using data from the Japan-led XRISM observatory, astronomers have directly observed a stellar wind from the blue hypergiant Wray 977 being captured by its companion, the pulsar GX 301-2, powering strong X-ray flares in the high-mass binary system BP Crucis, located about 13,000 light-years away in the constellation Crux. Wray 977 is roughly 40 times the Sun's mass, while the neutron star packs more than a solar mass into about 12 miles (20 kilometers) and rotates every 11 minutes. A paper describing the findings was published Friday in Science Advances.