Space rock (Image: S. Chatterjee/J.M.Cordes/Palomar Observatory)
IT’S the biggest guitar in the galaxy. The Guitar pulsar is a stellar corpse that is tearing through interstellar gas and creating a guitar-shaped wake of hot hydrogen (pictured). Its birthplace may now have been found.
Little is known about the origins of such wayward stellar remnants. To hunt for the pulsar’s birthplace, Nina Tetzlaff at the University of Jena in Germany and colleagues projected the paths of 140 nearby groups of stars backwards in time over 5 million years.
Previous work suggests the star was ejected at over 1500 kilometres per second.…
