A pulsar is firing a 7-light-year-long antimatter stream into space

There’s an aphorism I’ve seen used here and there which goes, “Nature never draws in a straight line.”

It turns out that’s only mostly true, because sometimes it does, or gets pretty close. For example, a tiny BB of a star just a couple of dozen kilometers across has shot out a pretty straight beam of matter and antimatter that stretches for a staggering 7 light-years — 70 trillion kilometers!

That’s… very long. Even from our distance of 1,600 light-years the beam is half the apparent size of ...