- Spider Invasion Across the Galaxy
- Spider Invasion Across the Galaxy
- ㆍ 저자명
- Hui. Chung-Yue
- ㆍ 간행물명
- Journal of astronomy and space sciences
- ㆍ 권/호정보
- 2014년|31권 2호|pp.101-120 (20 pages)
- ㆍ 발행정보
- 한국우주과학회
- ㆍ 파일정보
- 정기간행물|ENG| PDF텍스트
- ㆍ 주제분야
- 기타
The nature of the exotic stellar corpses which reincarnate by consuming their companion is reviewed. Apart from sucking life from their partners, they are actually eating the doomed companions away by their deadly and powerful particle/radiation beams. Such situation resembles that a female "black widow" spider that eats its mate after mating. These celestial zombies are called - Millisecond pulsars (MSPs). In this review article, I will focus on the effort of Fermi Asian Network (FAN) in exploring these intricating objects over the last five years. Two special classes of MSPs are particularly striking. Since Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has started surveying the gamma-ray sky, the population of "black widows" has been boosted. Another dramatic class is so-called "redbacks" (Australian cousin of "black widows") which has just emerged in the last few years. These MSPs provide us with a long-sought missing link in understanding the transition between accretion-powered and rotation-powered systems. The strategy of hunting MSPs through mulitwavelength observations of the unidentified Fermi objects is also reviewed.