BRENT: NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered a fast-moving pulsar with a massive punch.
The pulsar seems to have punched a hole in a disk of gas around a star, launching disk fragments at a speed of over 6.4 million kilometres per hour.
NASA added that Chandra was tracking the clump, and it appears to be picking up speed as it moves out.
“The double star system PSR B1259-63/LS 2883 – or B1259 for short – contains a star about 30 times as massive as the Sun and a pulsar, an ultra-dense neutron star left behind when an even more massive star underwent a supernova explosion,” the space agency explained.
“These two objects are in an unusual cosmic arrangement and have given us a chance to witness something special,” said George Pavlov of Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania, lead author of a paper describing these results.
“As the pulsar moved through the disk, it appears that it punched a clump of material out and flung it away into space.”
NASA said that while the clump spans roughly a hundred times the size of our Solar System, it’s rather thin. In fact, the material in it has the mass equivalent to all the water in Earth’s oceans, it said.
Three observations from Chandra show the clump moving away from B1259 at increasing speed. The first observation showed an average speed of about seven percent of the speed of light, but subsequent observations show it has accelerated to 15 percent of the speed of light.
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