IT鈥橲 the biggest guitar in the galaxy. The Guitar pulsar is a stellar corpse that is tearing through interstellar gas and creating a guitar-shaped wake of hot hydrogen (pictured). Its birthplace may now have been found.
Little is known about the origins of such wayward stellar remnants. To hunt for the pulsar鈥檚 birthplace, Nina Tetzlaff at the University of Jena in Germany and colleagues projected the paths of 140 nearby groups of stars backwards in time over 5 million years.
Previous work suggests the star was ejected at over 1500 kilometres per second. The team says the pulsar鈥檚 path indicates that 800,000 years ago it was fired from a cluster of massive stars that now lies about 6500 light years away from Earth (, vol 400, p L99).
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It鈥檚 a puzzle why the pulsar is moving so fast. Speeds greater than 1000 kilometres per second are hard to account for with current astronomy models, says James Cordes of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The object鈥檚 distance is not known for sure, he points out, which could mean the pulsar鈥檚 speed and its position have been misjudged.
