Everyone involved should be really proud of this accomplishment. They even lived together all summer near school to complete their research. The swept-back shape of the nebula around the neutron star allowed the students to measure the speed at which it is traveling away from its origin. Using this result and the apparent distance that the neutron star has already traveled from the center of the supernova remnant, the students calculated that the light from the initial explosion arrived at Earth about 30,000 years ago. This news settled an unanswered question about the age of IC443.
Neutron stars send out strong beams of x-rays, and spin very fast.
The remaining star core, often no more than 10 miles in diameter, are very, very dense objects that sometimes spin and release beams of particles along their magnetic poles. X-rays are a very energetic form of light invisible to your eyes. To confirm the evidence they found in Chandra's x-ray observations, the students turned to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory installation called the Very Large Array, in Socorro, N.M., where they got VLA data on IC443. The information strengthened the team's conclusion that a pulsar was powering the supernova remnant. Such nebulas are a common characteristic of pulsars.