Volunteers' Idle Computer Time Turns Up a Celestial Oddball

A newfound stellar remnant some 17,000 light-years away is not your everyday pulsar. For starters, the hyperdense, swiftly pirouetting object appears to belong to a rare class known as disrupted recycled pulsars. Pulsars are so known because they rotate rapidly--this one spins more than 40 times a second--and give off a beam of radio waves that sweeps across the sky, much like a lighthouse. To an outside observer the radiation appears to pulse each time the beam points in the observer's direction. [More] Pulsar - Lighthouse - Neutron star - Einstein@Home - Arecibo Observatory

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