Comet Enthusiast

Astronomers have discovered n images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope that a pulsar, the remnant of a stellar explosion, is surrounded by a disk of its own ashes -the first such halo ever found. 

The pulsar, called 4U 0142+61 (image above), was once a massive star, until about 100,000 years ago, when it blew up in a supernova explosion and scattered dusty debris into space. Some of that debris was captured into what astronomers refer to as a “fallback disk,” now circling the leftover stellar core, or pulsar. The disk resembles protoplanetary disks around young stars, out of which planets are thought to be born.