The Skedaddlin' Pulsar

When a star like our sun runs out of fuel, it expands and then more or less peacefully collapses into a white dwarf. Stars bigger than our sun tend to blow up in novæ or supernovæ, then collapse into super-dense neutron stars or even black holes.

Neutron stars aren't all alike. Some of them, as they spin, emit jets or "pulses" of high-energy particles and are called "pulsars." Scientists study the frequency of the emissions and figure out how fast the neutron star is spinning.

So the pulsar IGR J11014-6103 prompts a lot of questions, because it's doing something other pulsars don't do: zipping along through space at close to five million miles an hour.

Now, everything in space is moving. Our planet, as we know, revolves around our sun. But our sun and solar system are also revolving, around the center of our Milky Way galaxy. That galaxy is moving as well, and when you throw in the way the universe expands, you've got a whole lot of motion in your interstellar ocean.

But IGR J11014-6103 has motion in addition to all of those others, wobbling around as it spins and zips along, meaning those pulses it emits are immense -- 37 light years long. If God hired you at age 18 to clean that up and gave you a vacuum that moved as fast as the speed of light, you would have been getting the AARP newsletter for five years by the time you finished.

The jets are "visible" to radio telescopes, and pulsars were first discovered by them when astronomers started using those kinds of instruments. IGR J11014-6103's jets are not visible in the radio spectrum, though, but in the X-ray spectrum. It's as if a dog whistle could be heard by humans but didn't register with Fido at all.

And as with most weird objects that don't match the profile of other objects they're supposed to be like, astronomers are looking forward to the fun of figuring out just how in the heck the darned thing got where it is, does what it does and looks like it looks.