This tiny pulsar is blazing through our galaxy at more than 1.4 million miles per hour

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has witnessed a tiny pulsar blazing through our Milky Way galaxy at a speed of over a million miles per hour.

A pulsar is the crushed core of a massive star that ran out of fuel, collapsed under its own weight and exploded as a supernova. Astronomers say this stellar speedster is one of the fastest objects of its kind ever seen and it is racing through the remains of the supernova explosion that created it, named G292.0+1.8, located about 20,000 light-years from Earth.

The researchers compared Chandra images of G292.0+1.8 taken in 2006 and 2016 and found that it is moving at least 1.4 million miles per hour from the centre of the supernova remnant to the lower left - that's nearly 30% higher than a previous estimate of the pulsar's speed that was based on an indirect method.

"We directly saw the motion of the pulsar in X-rays, something we could only do with Chandra's very sharp vision. Because it is so distant, we had to measure the equivalent of the width of a quarter about 15 miles away to see this motion," said Xi Long of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), the lead author.

Further, the researchers examined how the supernova gave the pulsar its powerful kick. According to the team, there are two main possibilities, with the first one being that neutrinos produced in the explosion are ejected from the explosion asymmetrically, and the other is that the debris from the explosion is ejected asymmetrically. If the material has a preferred direction the pulsar will be kicked in the opposite direction because of the principle of physics called the conservation of momentum.

The findings on G292.0+1.8 were presented at the 240th meeting of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena, California.

Streaking from the aftermath of a stellar explosion, a tiny pulsar spotted by @ChandraXray is blazing through the Milky Way at more than 1.4 million miles an hour (2.25 million kilometers per hour): https://t.co/U37Jkko4a3 pic.twitter.com/Tzk1jnn8O2

— NASA (@NASA) June 17, 2022