Scientists have discovered a pulsar that punched a hole in the disk of gas surrounding its companion star, launching a chunk of it into space at four million miles and hour.
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is now tracking the expelled gas, and has observed that it is picking up speed. The double star system contains a star about 30 times as massive as the Sun and a pulsar, which is neutron star left behind from a supernova explosion. This pulsar emits pulses as it spins 20 times a second, creating a strong energetic wind of high-speed particles moving at the speed of light. The companion star is spinning off a large disc of material.
"These two objects are in an unusual cosmic arrangement and have given us a chance to witness something special," said lead author George Pavlov of Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania. "As the pulsar moved through the disk, it appears that it punched a clump of material out and flung it away into space."
The rogue clump of the material is large enough to span a hundred times the size of our Solar System, but is extremely thin and only contains material about equivalent to the world's oceans.
"After this clump of stellar material was knocked out, the pulsar's wind appears to have accelerated it, almost as if it had a rocket attached," said co-author Oleg Kargaltsev of George Washington University (GWU).
Chandra observations taken between December 2011 and February 2014 showed the clump moving away from B1259 at an average speed of about 7 percent the speed of light, since then it has increased to about 15 percent of the speed of light.
"This just shows how powerful the wind blasting off a pulsar can be," said co-author Jeremy Hare, also of GWU. "The pulsar's wind is so strong that it could ultimately eviscerate the entire disk around its companion star over time."
The findings were published in a recent edition of The Astrophysical Journal.
