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NASA's Chandra sees runaway pulsar firing an extraordinary jet

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GK86

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NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has seen a fast-moving pulsar escaping from a supernova remnant while spewing out a record-breaking jet – the longest of any object in the Milky Way galaxy -- of high-energy particles.

The pulsar, a type of neutron star, is known as IGR J11014-6103. IGR J11014-6103's peculiar behavior can likely be traced back to its birth in the collapse and subsequent explosion of a massive star.

Originally discovered with the European Space Agency satellite INTEGRAL, the pulsar is located about 60 light-years away from the center of the supernova remnant SNR MSH 11-61A in the constellation of Carina. Its implied speed is between 2.5 million and 5 million mph, making it one of the fastest pulsars ever observed.

"We've never seen an object that moves this fast and also produces a jet," said Lucia Pavan of the University of Geneva in Switzerland and lead author of a paper published Tuesday,in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. "By comparison, this jet is almost 10 times longer than the distance between the sun and our nearest star."

The X-ray jet in IGR J11014-6103 is the longest known in the Milky Way galaxy. In addition to its impressive span, it has a distinct corkscrew pattern that suggests the pulsar is wobbling like a spinning top.

IGR J11014-6103 also is producing a cocoon of high-energy particles that enshrouds and trails behind it in a comet-like tail. This structure, called a pulsar wind nebula, has been observed before, but the Chandra data show the long jet and the pulsar wind nebula are almost perpendicular to one another.

"We can see this pulsar is moving directly away from the center of the supernova remnant based on the shape and direction of the pulsar wind nebula," said co-author Pol Bordas, from the University of Tuebingen in Germany. "The question is, why is the jet pointing off in this other direction?"

Usually, the spin axis and jets of a pulsar point in the same direction as they are moving, but IGR J11014-6103's spin axis and direction of motion are almost at right angles.

"With the pulsar moving one way and the jet going another, this gives us clues that exotic physics can occur when some stars collapse," said co-author Gerd Puehlhofer also of the University of Tuebingen..

One possibility requires an extremely fast rotation speed for the iron core of the star that exploded. A problem with this scenario is that such fast speeds are not commonly expected to be achievable.

The supernova remnant that gave birth to IGR J11014-6013 is elongated from top-right to bottom-left in the image roughly in line with the jet's direction. These features and the high speed of the pulsar are hints that jets could have been an important feature of the supernova explosion that formed it.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
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terrisus

terrisus

Member
"By comparison, this jet is almost 10 times longer than the distance between the sun and our nearest star."
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Hey, sounds like something that would be fun to just have sneak up on us.
 
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Samyy

Member
terrisus said:
Hey, sounds like something that would be fun to just have sneak up on us.
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As terrifying as all these things sound you have to remember our planet, even our solar system is a tiny speck of absolute nothing. Chances of anything very destructive affecting us is small.
 
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DarkKyo

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Samyy said:
As terrifying as all these things sound you have to remember our planet, even our solar system is a tiny speck of absolute nothing. Chances of anything very destructive affecting us is small.
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I think if you weight it the other way we're talking about 7 billion sentient brains vaporized in an instant. Pretty nuts that it could happen.
 
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Samyy

Member
Iceman said:
Are we essentially calling this space lightning?
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Er pretty much? Probably even less of a chance.
If anything like the hits us anyway we all die instantly so....yea all human achievement could be wiped out by some stupid random event in space in a second.

terrisus said:
But this is in our solar system.
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*Galaxy and yes our galaxy is like a quadrillion times larger then our solar system, I doubt we know about more then 1% of the things going on in our galaxy. Actually should say *happened as these events we are witnessing have happened millions of years in the past most likely.
 
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OJdaKiller

Member
Just finished watching How the Universe Works on Netflix. Great series.

For a second there I thought I kind of knew what some of the terms mentioned meant..It's all pretty amazing and mindblowingly complex...Fun to read about though.
 
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Samyy

Member
v1lla21 said:
What's the fastest moving object in space?
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Depends what type of object you mean.....
For instance I imagine objects falling into a black hole approach near C speeds
Technically I think there are galaxies moving away from us at speeds faster then C but I didn't fully understand the explanation why, I'll try googling around and finding a proper source.
 
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jet1911

Member
"By comparison, this jet is almost 10 times longer than the distance between the sun and our nearest star."
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That's pretty big. There are things in space that are so powerful, it's insane. :eek:
 
S

smokeandmirrors

Banned
v1lla21 said:
What's the fastest moving object in space?
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Photons


Samyy said:
Depends what type of object you mean.....
For instance I imagine objects falling into a black hole approach near C speeds
Technically I think there are galaxies moving away from us at speeds faster then C but I didn't fully understand the explanation why, I'll try googling around and finding a proper source.
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It's not the galaxy themselves moving faster than c, it's the space in between them is expanding faster than c.
 
C

Chichikov

Member
DarkKyo said:
We would never see it coming.......
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We could actually see this coming, not that we'll have anything to do, but we should be able to see it.
A gamma ray burst on the other hand...

Edit: not sure what a supernova at that distance would do to the earth, can't be nice. in any case, sleep tight tonight.
there is really no point worrying about such things.
 
terrisus

terrisus

Member
DarkKyo said:
No it is not. It's in our galaxy.

Edit: The point is, it is much much much much much larger than our solar system.
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Yeah, that was my mistake there, I don't know what I was thinking.

That was my point though - that it doesn't have to be something all that nearby, it could be happening somewhere else and just happen to catch us.
 
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