The Chandra X-ray Observatory has helped NASA scientists discover a fast-moving pulsar. Researchers have received a series of observations from Chandra, helping them get a deep look into how a pulsar about 7,500 light- years from Earth viciously attacks it stellar neighbor. The pulsar has punched a hole through a nearby star's shroud of dust.

The pulsar is an extremely dense, spinning neutron star. It belongs to a binary system with a star nearly 30-fold the size of the sun. Researchers also noticed the spin of the large star and found that it is also busy maintaining a disk of dust as material just escape from the swiftly revolving star.

The stellar disk gets a good enough hit from the pulsar to hurl a huge dust cloud at a speed that is comparable to 15% of the speed of light. It turns out that the hole-punching takes place periodically.

"These two objects are in an unusual cosmic arrangement and have given us a chance to witness something special. As the pulsar makes its closest approach to the star every 41 months, it passes through this disk", said George Pavlov of Penn State University in a statement.

The most recent collision resulted into the breaking off a chunk of dust having a size more than 100 times the size of the solar system's width.

Oleg Kargaltsev of George Washington University said this clump of stellar material was knocked out first, and then it was further accelerated by the pulsar's wind.

Researchers have to say that it's just the matter of time when the binary system, called PSR B1259-63/LS 2883, losses its dust ring as the pulsar wears it away.