Cosmic Broken 'Bone' Caused by Pulsar Hit-and-Run, NASA Satellite Reveals

The Milky Way has a broken "bone"—and it was caused by a collision with a pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star, speeding through it at some 1–2 million miles per hour.

This is the diagnosis of a U.S.-based team of astronomers, led from Northwestern University, who studied the cosmic fracture in G359.13142-0.20005 (also known as "the Snake"), one of a number of enormous, elongated structures found near the center of our galaxy.

Located in the constellation Sagittarius, some 26,000 light-years from the Earth, the Snake is a 230 light-year-long "Galactic Center Filament."

The team examined the Snake not with a hospital X-ray machine, but NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory (as well as the MeerKAT radio array in South Africa).

"We argue that the major kink is created by a fast-moving object punching into the Snake, distorting its magnetic structure, and producing X-ray emission," the researchers wrote in their paper.

The Snake is one of the largest and brightest of all the Milky Way's Galactic Center Filaments. These bone-like structures, which can be seen in radio wave observations, are threaded by magnetic fields which they run parallel to.

The radio emissions from these galactic bones are caused by energized particles spiraling along the magnetic fields.

In the newly-released image—which includes X-ray data from Chandra in blue and radio data from MeerKAT in gray—the fracture can be clearly seen in the otherwise uninterrupted length of G359.13142-0.20005.

Combining the Chandra and MeerKAT observations with data from the Very Large Array, a radio observatory in the Plains of San Agustin, Mexico, revealed a source of both radio waves and X-rays at the site of the fracture.

In the inset, the pulsar that is likely responsible for these emissions is highlighted. Additional X-rays may be being emitted from the collision site by electrons and positrons that have been accelerated to high energies.

Pulsars—like other neutron stars—are the dense remnants of massive stars that collapsed and went supernova. They can receive a powerful kick from these explosions, sending them careening through space at great speed.

The astronomers believe that when the runaway pulsar smashed into the middle of the Snake, it distorted the filament's magnetic field, causing the resulting radio signal to be deformed as well.

"A secondary kink is argued to be induced by the impact of the high-velocity object producing the major kink," the researchers wrote.

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Reference

Yusef-Zadeh, F., Zhao, J.-H., Arendt, R., Wardle, M., Heinke, C. O., Royster, M., Lang, C., & Michail, J. (2024). 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, 530(1), 254–263. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae549