The PSR J2030+4415 isn't just any pulsar.
Thanks to the absolute colossus of the beam that was discovered, that much is certain. A pulsar is a type of star that emits two beams of light as it spins. The beam is packed with matter and antimatter and spans 40 trillion miles, long enough to eclipse the entire solar system.
It's amazing that a pulsar that's only 10 miles across can create a structure so big that we can see it from thousands of light-years away.
50 years ago, Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars and changed our view of the universe.
The full moon in the sky would be half the diameter of the beam at the distance. Astronomers are interested in more than the beam size. A particle physics mystery could be solved by the massive structure.
Astronomers first saw the beam with Chandra in 2020, but they couldn't see the full expanse. Chandra was recently used by de Vries and his colleagues to do that.
The antimatter twins of electrons are the high-energy charged particles that make up the massive beam. With its charges reversed, antimatter is more rare than matter. The particles are usually within the confines of the magnetic field of the pulsar. The massive beam is formed by the leaking of them out into deep space.
The beam's discoverers think the leak is due to the bow shock of the pulsar, a part of the magnetic field that usually shows the pulsar as it moves through space. The magnetic field of space was hit by the pulsar. High-energy electrons and positrons began spraying out into space when the two connected.
Scientists can detect positrons all the time, but can't explain where they come from. If they formed in the early universe, the positrons would likely collide with normal matter, annihilating both of them. The source of the positrons scientists see today could be the PSR J2030+4415 fountain.
The paper was accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal after it was posted to the preprint server arXiv.org.
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