Get ready to bang your head in the name of science. A pair of NASA space telescopes teamed up to capture a nebula that looks like a flame-throwing guitar in space. The Guitar Nebula earned its name thanks to its resemblance to the stringed instrument popular with rockers. Data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope show the celestial instrument lookalike in the act of blasting out particles from a collapsed star.
Both space telescopes have decades of experience in documenting the cosmos. Hubble launched in 1990 while Chandra launched in 1999. That gives astronomers the opportunity to track changes over time. The Guitar Nebula has been doing some eye-catching shredding over the last couple decades.
A NASA video highlights Chandra’s ability to see activity near the top of the guitar.
The guitar’s overall shape is faint, but you can trace upward from the round body to the pointed “headstock” area where the tuners would be on a real guitar. “X-rays from Chandra show a filament of energetic matter and antimatter particles, about two light-years or 12 trillion miles long, blasting away from the pulsar (seen as the bright white dot connected to the filament),” NASA said in a statement on Nov. 20. The NASA video uses Chandra observations from between 2000 and 2021.
The pulsar connected to the Guitar Nebula is named PSR B2224+65. A pulsar is a rotating neutron star that kicks out regular pulses of radiation. NASA likens it to a lighthouse beacon. “The guitar shape comes from bubbles blown by particles ejected from the pulsar through a steady wind,” NASA said. Chandra’s ability to “see” X-rays allows it to capture the pulsar’s activity so we can see the guitar throwing “flames.” Talk about a rock star.
Space telescopes with different specialties often team up to give us a more complete picture of a cosmic object. The Hubble Space Telescope contributed optical observations to researchers’ understanding of the nebula. Hubble can document visible wavelengths of light like we can see with the human eye. Its powerful optics system extends that ability into the deep universe.
Hubble observations from 1994 through 2021 show motion in the pulsar and the “headstock” of the guitar. “A study of this data has concluded that the variations that drive the formation of bubbles in the hydrogen nebula, which forms the outline of the guitar, also control changes in how many particles escape to the right of the pulsar, causing subtle brightening and fading of the X-ray filament, like a cosmic blow torch shooting from the tip of the guitar,” NASA said. Chandra and Hubble’s views are helping astronomers understand how pulsars interact with the space between stars.
A flame-throwing guitar is a rare but occasionally real phenomenon on Earth. The movie “Mad Max: Fury Road” famously brought such a blazing instrument to the big screen. YouTube has some examples of musicians wielding the fiery contraptions. It’s the sort of thing that’s probably best left to the professionals or distant nebulas with stellar rock-and-roll dreams.
