A flaming nebula streaks across the universe in this video from our NASA Chandra Xray and Hubble telescopes. Astronomers have dubbed this structure the Guitar Nebula because of the guitar-shaped bubbles emanating from the pulsar in the lower left.
Meanwhile, the X-rays seen by Chandra (shown here in red) show a filament of energetic matter and antimatter particles moving away from the pulsar; this red line is about two light-years (12 trillion miles or 18 trillion km) long. This rapidly rotating, fast-moving star has a very strong magnetic field, which helps create the strange shapes shown in this video.

The guitar shape appears in the lower left, with the neck of the instrument facing the upper left. The guitar shape is ghostly and translucent, reminiscent of a floating cloud on a dark night. At the end of the neck, the head of the guitar comes to a sharp point and falls on a bright white dot. This point is a pulsar, and the guitar shape is a hydrogen nebula.

The pulsar also emitted an energetic X-ray burst that extends from the bright white dot to the upper right corner of the frame. Most of it appears as a line of red dots falling in a straight, densely packed line.

Credit: (X-ray) NASA/CXC/Stanford Univ./M. de Vries et al.; Optical full field: Palomar Obs./Caltech & inset: NASA/ESA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare)