This Nebula Blasts Particles Into Space. Also, It Looks Like a Guitar

NASA’s space telescopes tuned into an epic cosmic rock show, capturing new images of a space guitar that’s billowing in the wake of an erratic neutron star as it releases a flame-like streak across the cosmos. Think Mad Max: Fury Road, but in space.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope, a group of astronomers captured the raging celestial object that’s located around 2,700 light-years away from Earth. The new images helped astronomers identify what’s shooting out of the pulsar—a fast-rotating neutron star—and how the bizarre structure has evolved over time. The findings are detailed in a study published in The Astrophysical Journal. 

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Stanford Univ./M. de Vries et al.; Optical full field: Palomar Obs./Caltech & inset: NASA/ESA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare)

Astronomers have dubbed it the Guitar Nebula, though whether it truly resembles an acoustic guitar is up to you to decide. Anyhoo, this object gets its musical shape from bubbles being blown through a steady wind of particles ejected by the pulsar as it moves through space at a ludicrous speed of 475 miles per second (765 kilometers per second). Chandra’s X-ray observations also helped reveal a filament of energetic matter and antimatter particles that stretch for 2 light years long (or 12 trillion miles), blasting from the pulsar. As the particles spiral along the magnetic field lines around the pulsar, it creates the X-rays illuminated by Chandra’s observations. The pulsar itself, created in the wake of a massive star collapsing on itself, can be seen as the bright white dot connected to the fiery filament.

There’s a lot going on here, and it’s mostly due to the extreme nature of pulsars. Combining fast rotation and high magnetic fields of pulsars leads to particle acceleration and high-energy radiation, which in turn creates matter and antimatter particles as electron and positron pairs (antimatter is made up of antiparticles with the opposite electric charge of their corresponding particles of matter).

The pulsar and its guitar are flying through space, colliding with denser regions of gas. The most energetic particles escape the confines of the Guitar Nebula and fly to the right, creating the flame bursting out of pulsar. As the particles escape, they spiral around and flow along the magnetic field lines in the interstellar medium (the space in between stars) and can be spotted hanging out by themselves outside of the nebula.

By observing the Guitar Nebula, astronomers have a better understanding of how electrons and positrons travel through interstellar space, and one way they end up in between the stars.