If you’ve never been in a street fight, and boxing is too technical to follow, then before you sprint to your nearest dojo, consider that all the punches delivered in the history of humanity are to what a pulsar travelling at a good chunk of light speed just did to a disk of matter orbiting a giant star. Bruce Lee said to kick to the moon, but Chandra just captured this pulsar just punting the equivalent of a planet into interstellar space.
CHANDRA HAS THE BEST SEAT IN THE HOUSE
Astronomers using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory orbiting the Earth witnessed the gigantic star called B1259 take this merciless beating in its home constellation Crux, also known as the Southern Cross. The punchee, B1259, is actually 30 times the mass of our Sun, and rotates at speeds so inconceivable that it actually bulges out at its sides. The puncher is a pulsar, i.e. an immensely dense mass of neutronium – the remains of an ancient star which, judging by how much is left of the pulsar, must have been even larger than its current punching bag.
I say punching bag because this mad pulsar actually forms a binary system with the star in an elliptical orbit of such high velocity that it punches right through the star’s extraneous disk every 3.5 years or so.
AFTERMATH’S HUMANITY
Astronomers observed the aftermath of this recent violence solemnly announced that the effected matter was hit with such magnificent force that what’s left of it has been expelled into interstellar space at 15 percent light speed (over 20 million miles per hour!).
Oleg Kargaltsev , Assistant Professor of Physics at George Washington University in Washington D.C. opined that “[a]fter 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.”
His colleague, Jeremy Hare, added that “[t]his just shows how powerful the wind blasting off a pulsar can be…[t]he pulsar’s wind is so strong that it could ultimately eviscerate the entire disk around its companion star over time,” making what’s likely the most megalithic and apt use of the verb in the history of the English language.”
CHANDRA’S BEGINNINGS
Years before it exploded, the Columbia space shuttle installed the Chandra X-ray telescope in orbit in the year 1999. Once released, the scope boosted itself up into a particularly flashy elliptical orbit of its own, beyond Earth’s outermost charged-particle rings. This enabled Chandra to help us ogle the most heated spaces in the universe by virtue of its superlative X-ray tech.
It will be another 41 months before the next slug fest begins, so until then feel free to peruse this Astrophysical Journal at your leisure, ladies and gents.
