The VLA radio telescope peered into the Boomerang Nebula — a cloud inflated by the wind from a rapidly spinning neutron star. The new images reveal details as small as a lunar disk on the sky: an elongated core around the pulsar and a long arc curving around it from the north. The arc doesn't touch the core: there's a dark gap between them, like the space between a shore and a wave.

It turns out the field in the nebula is twisted like threads on a spool. The bright northwestern lobe is 60% polarized — almost the maximum that the radiation itself allows. But at lower frequencies, the signal was weaker: on its way to us, the waves passed through magnetized gas and rotated slightly. This rotation, like a compass needle twisting, revealed the field strength — about 50–105 microgauss. For comparison, at Earth's surface the field is hundreds of times stronger, but here it's stretched over light-years.

So the wind from a dead star, accelerated to nearly the speed of light, slams into interstellar gas and sculpts it into a glowing carousel. The arc, the lobe, and a tongue to the northeast are traces of this invisible work.