NASA Space Telescope Video Shows a Neutron Star in Action 1,000 Light Years Away

The latest image from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows one heck of a light show a mere thousand light years from Earth.

Video caught from NASA's space telescope released this week catches footage from the Vela pulsar, a neutron star formed after a massive star collapsed, emitting a pulsating stream of matter from the spinning heavenly body.

Launched in July 1999, the telescope is designed to detect X-ray emission from very hot regions of the Universe.

According to NASA, the Vela pulsar is roughly 1,000 light-years from Earth and about 12 miles in diameter. The star also rotates completely in an astonishing 89 milliseconds, which out-speeds the whirring of a helicopter rotor.

The stream of particles spins along the pulsar's axis at roughly 70 percent the speed of light.

Astronomers have been observing the Vela pulsar in the hopes that they could study how a pulsar and its jet work. The jet emitted from the Vela has striking similarities to similar jets made by accreting supermassive black holes in other galaxies.

"We think the Vela pulsar is like a rotating garden sprinkler -- except with the water blasting out at over half the speed of light," Martin Durant of the University of Toronto in Canada, told NASA.

Durant wrote a paper describing these results that will appear in Thursday's edition of "The Astrophysical Journal."

Evidence of the newly collected images indicate that the neutron star may be slowly wobbling, or precessing, while it spins. If confirmed, it would mark the first such star that ever behaved like this.

Experts are theorizing several possible scenarios that explain why the star behaves the way that it does.

One explanation is that the star has become slightly distorted and is no longer a perfect sphere. With the star's fast rotation and "glitches," or sudden increases of the pulsar's rotational speed due to the interaction of the superfluid core of the neutron star with its crust, it is possible that the combination of the two have been causing the distortion.

"The deviation from a perfect sphere may only be equivalent to about one part in 100 million," said co-author Oleg Kargaltsev of The George Washington University in Washington. "Neutron stars are so dense that even a tiny distortion like this would have a big effect."

But another possibility could be that the powerful magnetic fields around the neutron star are shaping the jet, as co-author George Pavlov, principal investigator of the Chandra proposal at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, explains.

 "It's like having an unsecured fire hose and a flow of water at high pressure," Pavlov said. "All you need is a small bend in the hose and violent motion can result."