In the 11 months since the Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched into orbit, X-ray astronomy has gotten a big shot in the arm. Several astronomers who have been using it shared recent findings with colleagues and the press on Tuesday and Wednesday, June 6th and 7th. Among the objects they highlighted were weird structures around the Vela pulsar, an X-ray bright planetary nebula, and an extremely high-energy galactic jet.

The Vela pulsar is a very young neutron star about 1,000 light-years away spinning 11 times a second. It's the tiny, dense remnant of a supernova that exploded about 10,000 years ago. The pulsar is only about 20 kilometers wide, but its surface is so hot (2 million degrees Kelvin) that it shines very brilliantly in X-rays, showing up as a bright dot in Chandra's images.

The Vela pulsar is known for its "glitches": sudden, slight changes in spin rate. A major glitch occurred on January 16th, and shortly thereafter Chandra homed in for a look. Current theories of how glitches work predict that the pulsar's surface should have been heated slightly as a result. But Chandra found its temperature to be holding rock steady to at least one part in 300. Glitch theorists will have to go back to the drawing board.

An intriguing little nebula showing complex structure surrounds the pulsar. In the top image shown above, the two bright arcs appear to be the near sides of two nested rings. Jets emerge from the pulsar perpendicular to the rings and presumably mark the neutron star's rotational poles. Intriguingly, the jets are lined up precisely with the direction in which the pulsar is moving across the sky at 100 km per second. This duplicates a similar jet-and-motion alignment found earlier for the Crab Nebula pulsar, an even younger supernova remnant. Some astronomers had wondered whether this alignment in the Crab was a coincidence, apparently not.

"It's very tempting to assume that the jet acts like a rocket to accelerate the pulsar," George V. Pavlov (Penn State University) told assembled science reporters on Tuesday. The jets carry little mass but move with extreme speeds. They consist of particles accelerated by an electric field as strong as hundreds of billions of volts per centimeter near the pulsar's poles. The pulsar’s superstrong magnetic field and fast spin generate this electric field. If the jet from one pole is stronger than the jet from the other, its rocket effect, lasting for thousands of years, might indeed be enough to accelerate pulsars to their observed high speeds, suggested Pavlov.

The mainstream explanation, on the other hand, is that supernova explode asymmetrically and impart a kick to their pulsar offspring at birth. If so, the jets seen by Chandra suggest that the kick be somehow imparted along the exploding star's axis of rotation.

Another team of astronomers used Chandra to examine a tiny, young

planetary nebula -- and found it to contain shocked, X-ray-hot gas as theory predicts.

A bubble of gas surrounds the dying star BD+30 3639 about 5,000 to 8,000 light-years away. Fast winds emitted by the hot white dwarf at its center should collide with slower material ejected earlier, heating it to X-ray temperatures of millions of degrees. Joel H. Kastner (Rochester Institute of Technology) displayed a picture of the first proof that this is happening. Chandra also found the spectral signature of neon in the hot gas, showing that it contains material dredged up from the deepest layers of the central star.

The workings of planetary nebulae could have broad implications. The beautifully symmetrical, a companion orbiting the outgassing star -- a companion that in some cases could be as small as Jupiter, may cause bipolar shapes shown by most planetaries. "The asymmetries we see in planetary nebulae could be telling us something about these stars' planets," said Kastner. An expanding giant star could engulf a Jupiter late in life, which would spin it up to a faster rotation rate, Kastner explained. The spin would eventually shape the ejected nebula. Alternatively, a larger-mass companion orbiting farther away could gravitationally shepherd a planetary's gaseous outflow.

The giant radio galaxy Pictor A is the most powerful radio emitter within 650 million light-years. Chandra showed that it is also emitting a very thin particle beam at least 800,000 light-years long. The beam crashes into the far ends of great lobes of gas that are seen at radio wavelengths on either side of the galaxy.

In the region of the crash, explained Andrew S. Wilson (University of Maryland), electrons must get accelerated to speeds so close to the speed of light that each carries 100 million times more energy than resides in its own mass. "This is the first time such acceleration has been seen so far away from a galaxy." We may be looking at one of the sources of very-high-energy cosmic ray particles.