The Black Widow Pulsar is an eclipsing binary millisecond pulsar in the Milky Way. Discovered in 1988, it is located roughly 6,500 light-years away from Earth. It orbits with a brown dwarf or Super-Jupiter companion with a period of 9.2 hours with an eclipse duration of approximately 20 minutes. When it was discovered, it was the first such pulsar known. The prevailing theoretical explanation for the system implied that the companion is being destroyed by the strong powerful outflows, or winds, of high-energy particles caused by the neutron star; thus, the sobriquet black widow was applied to the object. Subsequent to this, other objects with similar features have been discovered, and the name has been applied to the class of millisecond pulsars with an ablating companion, as of February 2023 around 41 black widows are known to exist.
The blue and green are optical images of the field in which the black widow pulsar is found, the green indicating the H-alpha bow shock. The red and white are the colors of the shock structures discovered in x-ray by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.