NASA Spots 5 Million Mph Pulsar, has Longest Trail of Any Object in Galaxy

New images from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory reveal a runaway pulsar breaking a major cosmic record: The jettisoned object, zooming by at speeds up to 5 million mph, has left in its wake a jet trail that stretches 37 light years - the longest ever seen from an object in our galaxy.

Pulsars are a type of neutron star that spin extraordinarily fast. The object is a dense stellar remnant produced by the collapse of the core of a massive star as part of a supernova that destroys the rest of the star.

The pulsar in this case, known as IGR J11014-6103, is located in the constellation of Carina and its remarkable behavior can be traced back to its birth after the supernova exploded, NASA reported. The pulsar's implied speed, between 2.5 million and 5 million mph, making it one of the fastest pulsars ever observed, NASA said in a statement.

"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, lead author of a paper on the cosmic event detailed 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 image above shows a supernova remnant in the top left of the frame. The pulsar jet is the streak of purple in the lower right of the frame. The pulsar itself is the left-most point of the jet trail, and the white blur on top of it is a pulsar wind nebula.

According to the Chandra Observatory: "These features and the high speed of the pulsar suggest that jets could have played an important role in the supernova explosion that formed IGR J1104-6103."

The pulsar's jet and the pulsar wind nebula are nearly perpendicular to one another, which is puzzling to scientists.

"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 study co-author Pol Bordas, from the University of Tuebingen in Germany. "The question is, why is the jet pointing off in this other direction?"

The orientation of the celestial objects is atypical. Usually the spin axis and jets of a pulsar point in the same direction as they are moving, but in this case, the 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 Gerd Puehlhofer another co-author from the University of Tuebingen.

In its assessment of the event, the Chandra Observatory said one possibility for why this happened is "an extremely fast rotation speed for the iron core of the star that exploded as the supernova." But the scientists said the scenario poses problems because such fast speeds are not usually not considered possible.