NASA spots 'pumpkin' stars and the 'ghostly' heart of a supernova

Just in time for Halloween, NASA has released detailed images of some of its spookier recent space discoveries including a patch of pumpkin-shaped stars and the still-beating heart of a supernova.

The space agency's Kepler and Swift missions have discovered a group of spinning stars that produce X-rays at more than 100 times the peak levels ever seen from the sun.

According to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, the stars are spinning so fast, "they've been squashed into pumpkin-like shapes."

NASA animation depicts origin of 'pumpkin' star

8 years ago

Duration 1:48

Explains theory of how two stars merged into one

"These 18 stars rotate in just a few days on average, while the sun takes nearly a month," team leader Steve Howell, a senior research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said in a release.

"The rapid rotation amplifies the same kind of activity we see on the sun, such as sunspots and solar flares, and essentially sends it into overdrive."

• Super spiral galaxies are beautiful giants

One of the stars, an orange giant calledKSw 71, is 10 times larger than the sun,rotatesin 5.5 days, and produces X-ray emissions 4,000 times greater than the sun does at solar maximum, NASA said.

The discovery came from a survey conducted by theKepler mission, which searched our region of the Milky Way galaxy in search of terrestrial planets. To date, the mission has confirmedmore than 2,300 confirmed exoplanets and nearly 5,000 candidates.

'A dead star's ghostly glow'

The Goddard Space Flight Center has also released a Hubble Space Telescope imageof what it calls "a dead star's ghostly glow" in the Crab Nebula, a region of spaceknown forremnants of exploding stars, better known assupernovas.

• PHOTOS:Iconic images from Hubble Space Telescope
• Astronomers unravel the mystery of 'giant space blob'

"But don't be fooled. The ghoulish-looking object still has a pulse," wrote Ray Villard of the Space Telescope Science Institute. "Buried at its centre is the star's tell-tale heart, which beats with rhythmic precision."

He's referring to a neutron star, the crushed core of a supernova, which he says "has about the same mass as the sun but is squeezed into an ultra-dense sphere that is only a few miles across and 100 billion times stronger than steel."

• Canadian physicist IDs young neutron star

And like pumpkins, this neutron star is rapidly spinning. NASA said it rotates30 times per second.

"The wildly whirling object produces a deadly magnetic field that generates an electrifying onetrillion volts," said Villard. "This energetic activity unleashes wisp-like waves that form an expanding ring, most easily seen to the upper right of the pulsar."