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As big stars age, they get more intense and scary. Among the worst are the 'black widows'.

When a star between 10 and 25 times heavier than our Sun runs out of fuel, its core collapses and it explodes in a supernova, leaving behind a ball of neutrons 10 kilometers across with mass slightly bigger than our Sun. If this is spinning fast - and it often will be! - deadly beams of radiation shoot from near its poles. It's then called a pulsar.

Now imagine that this star had another star orbiting it. This is not rare: most stars come in pairs!

If the pulsar's beam happens to hit its companion star, it's like blasting a firehose at a big pile of sand. The companion doesn't get instantly destroyed, but its gas gets ripped off and it gradually shrinks away.

If the companion is less than 1/10 the mass of the Sun, we call the pulsar a 'black widow'. If it's bigger, we call the pulsar a 'redback' or 'huntsman' - two other kinds of venomous spider.

This video shows PSR J1311-3430, a black widow discovered in 2012. Astronomers were carefully looking at a pulsar and found it has a small companion that changes color from intense blue to dull red every hour and a half.

It turns out the pulsar's beam is heating a red dwarf, making it blue-hot! The side of this star facing the pulsar is heated to 12,000 °C, more than twice as hot as the Sun’s surface. The other side stays red, glowing at a temperature of 2,700 °C — half the Sun’s surface temperature.

I shudder to think what would happen to a planet anywhere near a pulsar.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgI3w4SOAik