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Abstract

Pulsars are extreme laboratories that have been compelling high-energy astrophysics since almost 50 years ago. In particular, they have shown to be able to produce jets, previously associated only to accretion-powered sources. Pulsar jets are however restricted so far to young systems still embedded in their progenitor supernova remnant (SNR). No jets have been yet clearly identified in fast runaway systems, which are thought to be born through different, yet unconstrained supernovae explosion mechanisms. We report here the first evidence of the formation of large-scale X-ray jets associated to a high velocity neutron star, the system IGR J11014-6103. At a distance of 7 kpc, their intrinsic length exceeds 11 parsecs, making them the largest X-ray jets ever observed in our Galaxy. The jets are powerful, extremely well collimated, and display a clear corkscrew modulation, reminiscent of a precession pattern. Our findings not only challenge current pulsar jet formation models. Together with the presence of the parent SNR, they also suggest that core-collapse supernovae mechanisms can impart kick velocities above 1000 km/s to misaligned-spinning neutron stars.