🚀 Cosmic Crime Solved: A Speeding Pulsar Smashed a Galactic "Bone"!

Scientists have cracked the case of a cosmic hit-and-run—one that left a 230-light-year-long "bone" in our galaxy with a mysterious break!

🔍 The victim? A massive, snake-like filament in the Milky Way’s center, nicknamed "The Snake" (G359.13). Mostly smooth, it has two strange kinks—and now, astronomers know what caused one of them.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and MeerKAT radio telescope, researchers spotted the culprit: a runaway pulsar blasting through space at up to 2 million mph (1,000 km/s)!

💥 How did this happen?
Pulsars are dead star cores (neutron stars) that sometimes get "kicked" at insane speeds after a lopsided supernova explosion. This one plowed through the Snake, warping its magnetic fields and leaving behind a trail of X-rays and radio waves.

🌌 What’s next?

  • The second kink’s cause remains unsolved.

  • The pulsar might escape the Milky Way someday—but it’s got 26,000 light-years to go first!

📸 Check out the stunning composite image (radio + X-ray) showing the cosmic collision!

#SpaceMystery #Astronomy #MilkyWay #Pulsar #NeutronStar #CosmicCrime #NASA #Chandra #MeerKAT #ScienceNews

Reference

F Yusef-Zadeh, Jun-Hui Zhao, R Arendt, M Wardle, C O Heinke, M Royster, C Lang, J Michail, G359.13142-0.20005: a steep spectrum radio pulsar candidate with an X-ray counterpart running into the Galactic Centre Snake (G359.1-0.2), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 530, Issue 1, May 2024, Pages 254–263, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae549.

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