From time to time, NASA releases some surreal and quite literally "out of the world" images from various corners of the universe, captured by their numerous exploratory telescopes. On Tuesday, the American space agency's 21-year old Chandra X-ray observatory released a jaw-dropping image of a pulsar.
A pulsar is a space object that radiates two narrow beams of lights in opposite directions. Pulsars are known to spin, leading an untrained human eye to believe that they are flickering stars, which they are not. They are as large as a city and carry more weight than the sun. Scientists keep an eye out for pulsars while searching for planets outside the solar system.
The image of a pulsar captured by the Chandra X-ray observatory shared on its Instagram account can be identified as the bright blue light on the right-hand side.
The pulsar seen in the image — SXP 1062 — is said to be among the slower spinning ones, with one full rotation taking 18 minutes. PSR J1748-2446ad, the fastest rotating pulsar known to astrophysicists, by contrast, rotates 716 times per second!
This pulsar is likely one among the thousands of pulsars that the Chandra has found since 1999, but is dwarfed by some of its other finds.
"Chandra has traced the separation of dark matter from normal matter in the collision of galaxies in a cluster and is contributing to both dark matter and dark energy studies," says the telescope's website.
For the newer astronomy and astrophysics experts out there, it's always worth keeping an eye on the Chandra, whose finds in far corners of the universe are a revelation.