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"gewg_" writes:

Space.com reports:

A super-dense spinning star punched a hole right through its stellar neighbor, knocking off a giant cloud of dust and ejecting it away at nearly 15 percent the speed of light, images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory reveal.

The fast-spinning neutron star, known as a pulsar, is part of a double-star system about 7,500 light-years from Earth. Its partner star is about 30 times the size of Earth's sun and also spins quickly, generating a dusty disk around itself as material flies off. Observations from the Chandra observatory show that every so often, the pulsar pierces its partner's dust disk.

"These two objects are in an unusual cosmic arrangement and have given us a chance to witness something special," study lead author George Pavlov, a researcher at Penn State University in Pennsylvania, said in a statement. "As the pulsar makes its closest approach to the star every 41 months, it passes through this disk."

[...] The massive dust clump fled the star at an average of 7 percent the speed of light but, by the time the researchers looked again a year later, it had sped up to 15 percent. The X-ray signals that Chandra picked up were probably generated from the shock waves as particles let loose by the pulsar's activity, flying at near the speed of light, hit the dust over and over and sent it blasting forward, the researchers said.

[...] The research was detailed in the June 20 edition of the Astrophysical Journal. [iop.org - Abstract only]

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