Pulsars

A Close Pulsar Measures 11.4 km Across

When massive stars detonate as supernovae, they leave often behind a pulsar. These fast rotating stellar corpses have fascinated scientists…

3 months ago

Spider Pulsars are Tearing Apart Stars in the Omega Cluster

Pulsars are extreme objects. They're what's left over when a massive star collapses on itself and explodes as a supernova.…

10 months ago

A Pulsar Suddenly Threw Out Radiation 200 Times More Energetic

Pulsars are so dependable you could set your watch to them, sometimes turning hundreds of times a second with incredible…

12 months ago

Magnetar Glitches, Fast Radio Bursts, And…Asteroids???

Recently astronomers have been able to associate two seemingly unrelated phenomena: an explosive event known as a fast radio burst…

1 year ago

Astronomers Find the Fastest Spider Pulsar, Filling in the Missing Link in Their Evolution

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars which release blasts of radio waves with atomic clocklike accuracy. The fastest can be…

1 year ago

Pulsars Could Help Map the Black Hole at the Center of the Milky Way

The BlackHoleCam project, part of the Event Horizon Telescope consortium, will use the powerful EHT array to search for pulsars…

1 year ago

The Heaviest Neutron Star Ever Seen Got There by Feasting on its Companion

Life's not too good if you're the companion of a black widow. Here on Earth, spiders by that name feast…

2 years ago

A Pulsar and Star are Orbiting Each Other Every 62 Minutes. The Fastest “Black Widow” Binary Ever Seen

Caption: An illustrated view of a black widow pulsar and its stellar companion. The pulsar’s gamma-ray emissions (magenta) strongly heat…

2 years ago

Pulsars Could Explain the Excess of Gamma Radiation Coming from the Center of the Milky Way

A gamma-ray view of the sky centered on the core of the Milky Way Galaxy. Could strange spinning neutron stars…

2 years ago

A Pulsar is Blasting out Jets of Matter and Antimatter

Why is there so much antimatter in the Universe? Ordinary matter is far more plentiful than antimatter, but scientists keep…

3 years ago