Roche potential by peridot_faceted

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

This describes the gravitational and centrifugal potential around an accreting neutron star. Called PSR J1023+0038, this system was a radio millisecond pulsar orbited by a vaguely Sun-like star. In 2013, something changed and the Sun-like star started dumping material on the pulsar. This model illustrates how: the larger object is the potential around the two objects. Gravity produces the wells around each object, while centrifugal force causes anything too far out to be flung away. The five Lagrange points are the peaks and saddle points of this model. The companion is less massive than the pulsar, so it sits in the smaller of the two wells, but the wells are so small - this whole model would fit inside our Sun - that the companion nearly fills its well. In fact, when accretion started, the companion started overflowing its well and material started falling towards the pulsar. The smaller piece of this model represents the companion filling its well just enough for matter to reach the L1 point (between the stars) and fall in to the pulsar, where it gets so hot it blazes in X-rays.