The neutron star PSR J1101-6101 is tearing through space at a breathtaking speed. It leaves behind a trail of charged particles, like a speedboat carving through water and dragging a foamy wake. The MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa watched this tail for ten and a half hours and saw something never noticed before: the tail is not smooth but streaked with transverse stripes.
These stripes are not just a pattern. They reveal how particles ejected by the star gradually leave the tail and drift into the surrounding interstellar space. From time to time, the tail loses stability, gives a shake, and another batch of particles bursts out. Out there, they collide with the Galaxy's magnetic field and make it glow in radio wavelengths. The stripes stretch for several parsecs — tens of trillions of kilometers.
By comparing the brightness of the stripes, scientists realized that almost all the particles the star has ejected over its lifetime have already dispersed into space. The tail itself is a temporary storage, not a prison. The magnetic field, lit up by the escaped particles, turned out to be surprisingly calm: it does not churn them chaotically but lets them fly straight for a long time. This is important for understanding how fast pulsars fill the Galaxy with energetic particles.
Pulsar PSR J1101-6101 is moving so fast that in a million years it would have escaped our Galaxy.
In Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous with Rama, a fast object hurtling through space leaves a trail that helps astronomers detect it.