Chandra and Hubble tune into the ‘flaming’ guitar nebula

A ‘flame throwing guitar’, usually only seen in heavy metal bands or certain post-apocalyptic movies, has been seen traveling through space. Astronomers used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope to capture video of this extreme space object.

A new movie of data from Chandra (red) and Palomar (blue) helps us figure out what’s going on in the Guitar Nebula. X-rays from Chandra show that a filament of high-energy matter and antimatter particles about 2 light-years or 12 trillion miles long (seen as bright white dots attached to the filament) is exploding from the pulsar. Masu).

Astronomers have named the structure, which is connected to pulsar PSR B2224+65, the “Guitar Nebula” because of its apparent resemblance to the device found in the glowing hydrogen light. The shape of the guitar arises from bubbles blown by particles emitted by a constant wind from the pulsar. Because the pulsar is moving from the bottom right to the top left, most of the bubbles were created in the past as the pulsar moved through a medium of different density.

At the tip of the guitar is a pulsar, a fast-spinning neutron star left after the collapse of a massive star. As it hurtles through space, it spews fiery filaments of particles and X-ray light that astronomers capture with Chandra.

How does the universe create something so strange? The combination of the two extremes of a pulsar’s fast rotation and high magnetic field causes the acceleration and high-energy radiation of particles, which combine with matter as electron-positron pairs. Antimatter particles are produced. In this situation, the normal process of converting mass into energy, famously determined by Albert Einstein’s E = mc2 equation, is reversed. Here, energy is converted to mass to create particles.

Particles spiraling along magnetic field lines around the pulsar produce X-rays, which Chandra detects. As the pulsar and its surrounding nebula of high-energy particles flew through space, it collided with a denser region of gas.

This allows the most energetic particles to escape from the range of the Guitar Nebula and fly to the right side of the pulsar, producing a filament of X-rays. As these particles escape, they spiral and flow along magnetic field lines in the interstellar medium, the space between the stars.

The new movie shows the pulsar and filament flying toward the top left of the image through Chandra data taken in 2000, 2006, 2012, and 2021. The movie contains the same optical image in each frame, so no local changes are shown. “guitar”. Another video, obtained using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (acquired in 1994, 2001, 2006, and 2021), shows the movement of the pulsar and smaller structures around it.

Studying this data, we conclude that the fluctuations that drive the formation of bubbles within the hydrogen nebula that form the guitar’s outline also control changes in the number of particles escaping to the right side of the pulsar, causing the guitar’s subtle brightening and fading. It was done. The X-ray filament is like a cosmic torch fired from the tip of a guitar.

The structure of the filament tells astronomers how electrons and positrons move through the interstellar medium. It also provides an example of how this process injects electrons and positrons into the interstellar medium.

A paper describing these results was published in The Astrophysical Journal in 2022.