WHAT?

Your point exactly!!
The fact is that theories are created, proven and disproved all the time. That's where the facination comes from.

465 RPS is unfathomable to me yet until disproven that's the facts.

Well I was just sharing additional interesting facts and ideas, because I knew people come here to read other's comments.

"But it is an assumption that the rate of pulsation is only determined by the rate of rotation. This is an example of what annoys Henry. We can't see it, so how can we say how it operates. We produce theories that give a coherent set of answers for enough cases that the theory becomes plausible. But, just like in the game of Simon Says, we start thinking we have the answers. "

Yes, when stating that the pulsar rotates 465 times per second, it is implied that this only holds if the theory on which the deduction is based is true. The reason it is stated as fact is that the sheer volume of observations consistent with this rather simple aspect of the interpretation of such objects is mind boggling. What's more, if we are to going to decouple the rotation rate of the object from the frequency of observed pulses, you have to come up with another satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon that is consistent with the literally millions of basic observations that essentially fit perfectly with the current paradigm.

No scientist on Earth actually believes that we understand Pulsars well, but the rotation rate, this most basic of theoretical deductions is so well supported by both the evidence and lack of contradictory evidence that we talk of it as fact until there is some sort of evidence or observation to suggest it is wrong.

"What bothers me more about this, is that if the pulsar is more massive than the star (the article doesn't say that but seems likely) why are we saying the pulsar is orbiting the visible star? As Steve pointed out, one doesn't orbit the other, the orbit each other. Again, sloppy verbiage due to our human experience that our solar system is dominated by co-orbiting bodies where one is much larger than the other."

Look, it may be sloppy verbiage or warped human-centric thinking or whatever your point is, but it's not that hard to understand what is implied or meant by the phrase you refer to. This is a popular science website – if it were to be absolutely precise with the language, then it would read more like a scientific journal which nobody but scientists would read because the language is so cumbersome and specialised.

Instead of saying 'the pulsar is in orbit around a star', we could say the more precise and accurate 'the pulsar and star are both moving along spacetime geodesics that wrap around each other due to the warpage of spacetime caused by masses of each body in question', but even this language is fairly non-technical and imprecise when it comes to physics.

This site simply reports on and summarises the latest scientific findings. If you want the whole shebang and detailed scientific arguments, go and look up the corresponding articles in the scientific journals!

What bothers me more about this, is that if the pulsar is more massive than the star (the article doesn't say that but seems likely) why are we saying the pulsar is orbiting the visible star? As Steve pointed out, one doesn't orbit the other, the orbit each other. Again, sloppy verbiage due to our human experience that our solar system is dominated by co-orbiting bodies where one is much larger than the other.

Thanks for the reply; I did some more reading on these enigmatic objects. Fascinating.

"I'm still thinking of the 465 times per second rotation. How are we measuring that?"

Rotation speed is most simply determined by measuring the time between spikes in the received radio flux from the object. Rapid timescale photometry of the source at visual wavelengths and observations at other wavelengths can also be used.

"Blah blah blah…"

I would say that posting ignorant comments on something that you obviously know very little about is fairly typical of human arrogance.

Refining admittedly imperfect scientific theories about the very nature of the remarkable universe in which we live would be considered the height of human ingenuity and the pinnacle of human achievement in my opinion. That is actually the way science works you know…

Bah! What you condemn as human arrogance, I would praise as a human curiosity of the most beautiful sort. Hell, to call it just that would be an understatement; I would call it a melding of our natural curiosities and our imagination, tempered to know nature, to discover the world and to maybe, just maybe, to understand the universe.

Are we arrogant on stand on this little speck of cosmic dust, and to claim that we might understand the universe? Would you also call ancient astronomers arrogant for noticing the planets wander around the stars, and to speculate on their true nature? To try to understand how they might move? On what they speculated on so widely, their descendants now send probes to on a regular basis. Maybe in the future our own descendants will have powerful enough telescopes to proves wrong and right, as we did in the case of ancient astronomers.

You call humans arrogant because they admit to be at fault when nature prove them so. I say call them arrogant only when they start ignoring nature altogether. :/

Since when do we know what is or is not possible, or normal????????????????????

Human arrogance once again.

However, what doesn't make sense to me is this apparent orbit, as a binary system that is. All binary systems we know of have a common centre of gravity somewhere…ie earth / moon, Pluto / Charon and many other bodies.

Also, it occurs to me that, the variation of the orbits seems rather odd, as the objects don't orbit around each other, which definately does seem to be a triple system.

Im inclined to form an opinion that the pulsar is in orbit around a neutron star in a fairly stable orbit, and the varying fluctuation of the pulsars position in orbit relative to the main sequence star will explain its comet like orbit.

Remember Jack McDevitts "The Hercules Text": maybe there is no 'natural' explanation…