so, there is a pulsar, sax j1808.4-3658, and it is a binary with a brown dwarf!
about 11,000 light-years away, the brown dwarf has a lot of hydrogen gas, and it forms an accretion disk around the pulsar. the pulsar’s super strong gravity channels the gas into it, and it comes in so hard that hydrogen fuses into helium! wow! cool! eventually, the helium piles up so much that a lot of x-rays come out! then, the helium blows off of the pulsar… wow! cool! anyway, it takes only 20 seconds to finish, but it was easy to figure out that this was a huge x-ray burst! like, really big!
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