NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory released a video of the Vela pulsar spinning through space.
The neutron star is only 12 miles in diameter and 1,000 light years away from Earth. It's spinning fast, too, completing 11 rotations every second. As Vela spins, it shoots out a jet of charged particles, which flies along the pulsar's rotation axis at 70 percent the speed of light.
Eight images of Vela were obtained between June and September of 2010, and they suggest that the pulsar is "precessing," or wobbling, as it spins through space. If Vela is, in fact, precessing, it will be the first time scientists have observed a neutron star's jet behaving this way.
These results were published in early January in The Astrophysical Journal.
Vela's may be precessing because the neutron star has become distorted and is no longer a perfect sphere. The researchers also suggest that the wobbling might be the result of "glitches" caused by interaction between the star's superfluid core and its crust.
"The deviation from a perfect sphere may only be equivalent to about one part in 100 million," co-author Oleg Kargaltsev of The George Washington University in Washington says in a Chandra press release. "Neutron stars are so dense that even a tiny distortion like this would have a big effect."
Many cosmic bodies precess. The Earth precesses completely (meaning the poles switch position) every 26,000 years. Every 72 years, the planet precesses one degree, meaning navigational stars like Polaris will no longer point North in the future. Vela is estimated to precess with a period of 120 days.
Vela was formed when a star exploded 10,000 years ago, forming a supernova. The pulsar was first linked to this supernova in 1968 by astronomers from the University of Sydney. An earlier, shorter video of Vela was released in 2003, but this video was shorter and its observations were not evenly spaced, not making the precession apparent. This new video, however, shows much more pronounced proof of Vela wobbling.
