A giant cosmic 'fart' is making a wobbling zombie star repeatedly flash us, 'groundbreaking' observations reveal

An enormous, ongoing cosmic "fart" is causing a mysterious zombie star to flare up repeatedly, shining bright pulses of X-rays toward Earth, a new study reveals. The unprecedented observations shed light on how some of the universe's most extreme objects interact with one another.

Around 13,000 light-years from Earth lies an unusual binary star system, known as BP Crucis. It contains a blue hypergiant star roughly 60 times larger than the sun , dubbed Wray 977, alongside a neutron star — the undead and ultradense remains of a star that exploded via a supernova — that astronomers have labeled GX 301-2.

This stellar "zombie," which contains the same mass as our home star packed into an object roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) across, is a type of neutron star called a pulsar , which has an extremely powerful magnetic field and spins rapidly. This means it constantly shoots out a wobbling beam of powerful electromagnetic radiation , including X-rays , into the cosmos at regular intervals. When this beam aligns with Earth — approximately every 11 minutes, in the case of GX 301-2 — our planet's telescopes detect a flash.

However, unlike most other known pulsars, GX 301-2 also emits frequent X-ray flares (separate from the regular beams), which cause it to shine much brighter at repeated intervals. And, until now, researchers were unsure why.

In the new study, published Sept. 18 in the journal Science Advances , researchers used the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) — a space telescope jointly operated by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency — to take a closer look at BP Crucis. In doing so, they discovered that the neutron star flared up every time it passed through a giant plume of "stellar wind plasma" shooting out of its hypergiant partner.

This is the first time that researchers have ever detected this type of stellar material interacting with a neutron star, or with any other similar stellar remnant, opening the door to studying similar systems in the future.

"We've never before seen clear indications of wind plasma falling onto a compact object," study first author Roi Rahin , a researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement . "We can now test our understanding of these processes in much greater detail."

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