Tour: NASA's Chandra, Hubble Tune Into 'Flame-Throwing' Guitar Nebula

Normally found only in heavy metal bands or certain post-apocalyptic films, a “flame-throwing guitar” has now been spotted moving through space. Astronomers have captured movies of this extreme cosmic object using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope.

The new movie of Chandra data helps break down what is playing out in the Guitar Nebula. X-rays from Chandra show a filament of energetic matter and antimatter particles, about two light-years or 12 trillion miles long, blasting away from the pulsar.

Astronomers have nicknamed the structure connected to the pulsar PSR B2224+65 as the “Guitar Nebula” because of its distinct resemblance to the instrument in glowing hydrogen light. The guitar shape comes from bubbles blown by particles ejected from the pulsar through a steady wind as it travels through space.

At the tip of the guitar is the pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star left behind after the collapse of a massive star. As it hurtles through space it is pumping out a flame-like filament of particles and X-ray light that astronomers have captured with Chandra.

How does space produce something so bizarre? The combination of two extremes — fast rotation and high magnetic fields of pulsars — leads to particle acceleration and high-energy radiation that creates matter and antimatter particles, as electron and positron pairs. In this situation, the usual process of converting mass into energy, famously determined by Albert Einstein's E = mc2 equation, is reversed. Here, energy is being converted into mass to produce the particles.

Particles spiraling along magnetic field lines around the pulsar create the X-rays that Chandra detects. As the pulsar and its surrounding nebula of energetic particles has flown through space, they have collided with denser regions of gas. This allows the most energetic particles to escape the confines of the guitar nebula and fly to the right of the pulsar, creating the filament of X-rays as they fly through space. When those particles escape, they latch onto magnetic field lines in the interstellar medium, that is, the space in between stars. They spiral around and flow along the magnetic field lines, in this case to the right of the pulsar.

Astronomers will continue to tune into the Guitar Nebula to see what plays out next.