Astronomers have witnessed a never-seen-before event in observations by ESA’s XMM-Newton spacecraft – a collision between a pulsar and a ring of gas around a neighbouring star. The rare passage, which ...

Like anthropologists piecing together the human family tree, astronomers have found that a misfit “skeleton” of a star may link two different kinds of stellar remains. The mysterious object, called ...

Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. An international team of astronomers has ...

Pulsars are one of the strangest celestial bodies in space. These cosmic lighthouses emit periodic bursts of radiation from their magnetic poles, and now a team of researchers claim they have detected ...

Neutron stars are so named because in the simplest of models they are made of neutrons. They form when the core of a large star collapses, and the weight of gravity causes atoms to collapse. Electrons ...

A rapidly spinning dead star’s wacky fluctuations in brightness are due to the extreme environment surrounding the object, according to a team of astronomers who observed it. Pulsars are fast-spinning ...

The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope has discovered around 300 rapidly spinning neutron stars. Each of the newfound objects sweep two beams of radiation across the universe like a cosmic lighthouse.

Some stars never really die. Pulsars are the undead magnetized cores of massive stars that have met their end in a supernova. They rotate furiously, spewing jets of electromagnetic radiation from ...

Imagine a star so dense that a teaspoon of its material would weigh as much as Mount Everest, spinning hundreds of times per second while beaming radio waves across the universe. These are pulsars, ...

In the paper ‘On the origin of the recently discovered ultra-rapid pulsar’ (Curr. Sci. 51; 1096-99; 1982) Venkatraman Radhakrishnan and I argued that the then recently discovered ‘solitary’ ...

Scientists have announced the discovery of nearly 300 gamma ray pulsars. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in conjunction with the international Fermi Large Area Telescope Collaboration, ...