Anna N. Żytkow

Anna Nikola Żytkow (; born 21 February 1947) is a Polish astrophysicist working at the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Cambridge. Żytkow and Kip Thorne proposed a model for what is called the Thorne–Żytkow object, which is a star within another star. Żytkow in 2014 was part of the team led by Emily M. Levesque which discovered the first candidate for such an object.

Thorne-Żytkow objects Working together with Kip Thorne in 1976, Żytkow developed a theoretical model for a new star type, the Thorne–Żytkow object (TŻO), which contains either a neutron star or a black hole core at the center of a stellar envelope. The evolution of such a star occurs rarely and only two processes exist that define the structure and evolution of a TŻO. In the first process a collision between a neutron star and a normal star, either dwarf or giant, must occur in order to merge the two into a single object.

Żytkow said upon the discovery: "I am extremely happy that observational confirmation of our theoretical prediction has started to emerge. Since Kip Thorne and I proposed our models of stars with neutron cores, people were not able to disprove our work. If theory is sound, experimental confirmation shows up sooner or later. So it was a matter of identification of a promising group of stars, getting telescope time and proceeding with the project." This group of planetesimals is now known as the Kuiper belt. Żytkow and the rest of the group members spent most of their time adjusting the focus of the camera and instruments attached to the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT). The group used the Monte Carlo method, which provided multiple simulations in two separate stages. The first stage is the detection rate for images that came from INT as a function of magnitude, which was investigated using artificial images adding to the original frames.