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The G292.0+1.8 supernova remnant contains a pulsar moving at over a million miles per hour. This image features data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (red, orange, yellow, and blue), which was used to make this discovery. The X-rays were combined with an optical image from the Digitized Sky Survey, a ground-based survey of the entire sky.
Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that can form when massive stars run out of fuel, collapse and explode. Sometimes these explosions produce a “kick,” which is what sent this pulsar racing through the remains of the supernova explosion. An inset shows a close-up look at this pulsar in X-rays from Chandra.
To make this discovery, the researchers compared Chandra images of G292.0+1.8 taken in 2006 and 2016. A pair of supplemental images show the change in position of the pulsar over the 10-year span. The shift in the source’s position is small because the pulsar is about 20,000 light-years from Earth, but it traveled about 120 billion miles (190 billion km) over this period. The researchers were able to measure this by combining Chandra’s high-resolution images with a careful technique of checking the coordinates of the pulsar and other X-ray sources by using precise positions from the Gaia satellite.
The team calculated the pulsar is moving at least 1.4 million miles per hour from the center of the supernova remnant to the lower left. This speed is about 30% higher than a previous estimate of the pulsar’s speed that was based on an indirect method, by measuring how far the pulsar is from the center of the explosion.
The newly determined speed of the pulsar indicates that G292.0+1.8 and its pulsar may be significantly younger than astronomers previously thought. The researchers estimate that G292.0+1.8 would have exploded about 2,000 years ago as seen from Earth, rather than 3,000 years ago as previously…
Read More: NASA’s Chandra Catches Pulsar in X-Ray Speed Trap