In partnership with the news team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the UW News office has posted a story about a rare and mysterious star system discovered by a team of astronomers and reported in a paper published this morning in Nature. The researchers report that the system appears to be a “black widow binary” — consisting of a rapidly spinning neutron star, or pulsar, that is circling and slowly consuming a smaller companion star, just as its arachnid namesake does to its mate.