Article by: Andacs Robert Eugen, on 15 March 2022, at 11:43 am Los Angeles time

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory made some fascinating observations.

The observatory made a fairly large contribution with its observations for the image above, to which other ground-based optical telescopes also contributed.

The final image shows an extremely long beam of matter and antimatter extending from a small pulsar.

Also, these observations of the beam can provide additional information to explain the surprisingly large number of positrons, the counterparts of antimatter to electrons (these are detected throughout our galaxy, the Milky Way).

The beam comes from a pulsar that is over 1600 light years away from us and has the name J2030 (the long name is PSR J2030 + 4415).

This pulsar has a size of approx. of a city, but it is extremely dense, the pulsars being known as very dense objects in the Universe.

J2030 formed like many others pulsars, following the collapse of a massive star, and according to NASA, J2030 spins approx. 3 times a second.

How was this filament created?

First of all, it is good to know, the X-rays from Chandra that are represented in the image, in blue, come right from the pulsar, moving along the lines of the magnetic field (their speed being ~ 1/3 of the speed of light) .

These X-rays can also be seen in the magnified image of NASA, which is in the upper right, where you can see that the X-rays created by the particles flying around the pulsar itself.

This is where the filament creation comes in. It sometimes happens that some of the particles escape from this "process", creating the filament.

One of the factors leading to these leaks is the speed of the pulsar, which travels at 1 million miles per hour.

In addition to Chandra's observations, the Gemini Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii was used (but not only). Optical light data were taken from it.

Source and more information here: https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2022/j2030/