Once thought as a distinctive feature to black holes, narrow jets that shoot matter into space in a continuous stream near the speed of light were also found by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, around a dense stellar corpse known as a neutron star.

Normal X-binary systems are made up of a normal star and a neutron star or black hole, with the normal star, orbiting the collapsed star. As this happens, the neutron star, with 14 times more mass than the normal star, collects the material leaving the orbiting star and creating a disk of matter around itself known as the accretion disk.

"For years, scientists suspected that something unique to black holes must be fueling the continuous compact jets because we only saw them coming from black hole systems,” said Simone Migliari, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. “Now that Spitzer has revealed a steady jet coming from a neutron star in an X-ray binary system, we know that the jets must be fueled by something that both systems share.”