Dead star travelling at 3.2mn km/h made kinks in cosmic 'snake'; radio signal offers clues

The Milky Way has a giant serpent-like cosmic "bone" that is fractured in two places. Scientists have been studying the two kinks in this mammoth structure and what could have caused them. They have now found an X-ray and radio source emitting from them. It is possible that an extremely dense neutron star called a pulsar slammed into it, cracking it in one of the two places.

Scientists who studied the massive structure say our galaxy has around 20 such formations, also known as the "bone" of the Milky Way, and are the "densest structures associated with spiral arms." The observation was made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, in addition to radio data from the MeerKAT Radio Telescope in South Africa and the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

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"The bones bridge Galactic spiral arms and local star formation activities, and present some of the fundamental kinematic properties of GMCs in general," the paper says.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and radio telescopes studied the Galactic Center Snake (aka G359.13), the 230-light-year-long filament. The two points at which it is broken showed strange activity, as a radio wave was seen coming through from the broken points of the cosmic snake.

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They think a fast-moving pulsar crashed into it, creating one of the kinks. The second one could also have been made by the same pulsar, although this has not been confirmed..

Researchers think that the pulsar was travelling at speeds of 1.6 million and 3.2 million km/h when it smashed into the cosmic snake. The magnetic field inside the bone took a hit and was disturbed as a result, warping the radio signal. Extra sources of these signals were likely created by electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, that moved to high energies.

"We argue that the major kink is created by a fast-moving (∼ 500−1,000 km s−1), object punching into the Snake, distorting its magnetic structure, and producing X-ray emission," the researchers state in the paper.

However, further observations are needed to confirm the pulsar hypothesis.