A strange neutron star has been discovered

Interns at the US Naval Research Laboratory’s Remote Sensing Department have discovered a neutron star that rotates at high speed and spreads rays around the world like a lighthouse.

According to Space, this neutron star or pulsar is located in the dense star cluster Glimpse-CO1 and at a distance of 10,700 light years from Earth. This millisecond pulsar rotates several hundreds of times per second and is the first example of its kind that has been discovered in the mentioned star cluster. The VLA telescope observed the pulsar on February 27, 2021, but the information remained buried in the data until McCarver and his colleagues discovered it in the summer of 2023.

Not only do the conditions of these neutron stars make them ideal laboratories for physics research in extraordinary conditions like no other in the universe, but their very precise timing means that several pulsars can be Used in cosmic clocks.

McCarver and his colleagues discovered the pulsar while examining images from the VLA telescope’s VLITE instrument to track new pulsars in 97 star clusters. Millisecond pulsars, like other neutron stars, are born when stars with a mass greater than 8 times that of the Sun reach the end of their lives.