Radical new photos show the undead star that formed the "Guitar Nebula" shooting out an epic flamethrower-like jet that is spinning along one of our galaxy's magnetic strings. The cosmic blowtorch, which contains antimatter particles created from pure energy, is helping scientists to learn more about the space in between stars, NASA says.
The Guitar Nebula is a giant cloud of hydrogen gas located around 6,500 light-years from Earth in the Milky Way that formed in the wake of the collapse of the B2224+65a pulsar, a rapidly-spinning neutron star leftover from the collapse of a massive star. The unusually shaped mass is a "bow wave," made up of material blown off B2224+65 by stellar winds as the pulsar moves through space, like the wave created around the front of a boat as it moves through water. From Earth, it looks like a simple acoustic instrument. But in reality, it is a chaotic, shapeless mass flowing behind the dead star.
