Jets are one of the most dramatic features to crop up in astrophysics. Researchers don’t fully understand the details of how they form, but at the most basic level, magnetic fields can create beams of energy and particles that flow away from a spinning star or former star. Pulsars – the remnants of larger mass stars – are one of the most common sources of jets, and thanks to a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal, we now know these jets can – in just the right conditions – become a source of antimatter.

Images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory have captured a stream of positrons – the anti-matter sister particle to electrons – streaming for 40 trillion miles. Lead author of the work, Martijn de Vries, comments: It’s amazing that a pulsar that’s only 10 miles across can create a structure so big that we can see it from thousands of light-years away. With the same relative size, if the filament stretched from New York to Los Angeles the pulsar would be about 100 times smaller than the tiniest object visible to the naked eye.

This long filament has been able to answer some big questions for scientists. Researchers regularly detect positrons, and exactly where all this anti-matter comes from has been a bit of a mystery. In general, where there is a lot of energy, Einstein’s good old E=Mc^2 allows energy to become a pair of particles – matter and antimatter – such as a positron and electron.

The energies in this system are amazing. Not only are particles forming, but the particles in the filament are moving at roughly one-third the speed of light.

Researchers have previously seen high-energy halos that are forming particles surrounding pulsars, but they seemed confined by the surrounding material. This new example of a pulsar with a massive filament with positrons in it shows these antimatter generators can sometimes fling their contents across the galaxy.

More Information

CXO press release