A Huge Beam of Antimatter Has Been Caught Streaming From This Runaway Pulsar

A dead star has left behind a trail of matter and antimatter particles.

The star is a pulsar that is around 12 miles in diameter and has a speed of around a million miles per hour.

The star has a comet-like tail of particles that spans 7 light-years.

The particles seen in the Chandra X-ray Observatory could help scientists figure out why there seems to be more antimatter in the Milky Way than they think.

J2030 is an X-ray and optical device. The x-ray and optical data are from NASA/CXC and M. de Vries.

The collapsed cores of stars have a main sequence mass between 8 and 30 times that of the Sun.

The stars have powerful magnetic fields. J2030 spins about three times a second, which is not as fast as these things can go, and a pulsar adds a high rotation rate to the mix.

The winds of charged particles are usually confined by the magnetic field.

The wind is behind J2030 because it is speeding through space. The bow shock is close to the magnetic field line. The bow shock seems to have slowed down, which means the star caught up with and punched through it.

The length of the material. M. de Vries is from NASA/CXC.

Roger Romani, an astronomer at Stanford University, said that this likely triggered a particle leak.

The high-energy electrons and positrons squirted out through a nozzle formed by connection.

The particles leaking out of the pulsar wind seem to have accelerated along this magnetic field line to speeds of about a third of the speed of light. The beam glows brightly in the X-rays, as you can see above.

A new paper on the phenomenon has been accepted by The Astrophysical Journal and is available on arXiv. On the Chandra website, you can download a high-resolution image of the beam.