Awesome video of a pulsar emitting a jet of x-rays and spinning at the speed of light

[Thanos]

A thousand light years away, you are looking a thousand years into the past at a 12 mile wide collapsed star

Incredible

A NASA space telescope has captured a movie of a collapsed star that's spinning more than 11 times each second and unleashing ultra-fast particles that move at 70 percent of the speed of light.

The new video of the spinning Vela pulsar was recorded by the Chandra X-ray Observatory shows a new look at the ultra-dense star, which is just 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide and located about 1,000 light-years from Earth. It spews out a jet of charged particles along its rotation axis as it spins.

"We think the Vela pulsar is like a rotating garden sprinkler

 

[TexasDrugAddict**]

Pretty cool. Why is it spinning though.

 

[Doughbelly]

Pretty cool. Why is it spinning though.

The simple answer is that a pulsar is a remnant of what used to be a regular star, all of which spin due to the way they're formed. All gravitationally bound celestial objects have spin due to the physics of how they're formed.

Even simpler answer: Because gravity, that's why.

 

[Kiddo716]

I love stuff like this.