In 1967, Jocelyn Bell, then a graduate student in astronomy at Cambridge University, noticed a strange signal, a series of sharp pulses that came every 1.3 seconds, in the data of her radio telescope that seemed too fast to be coming from anything like a star. Bell and her advisor Anthony Hewish initially thought they might have detected a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization that they named LGM-1, for “Little Green Men.” (It was later renamed.) It turned out not be aliens, but rather the discovery of the first pulsar. ‘Spider’ Pulsar System Now, more than 50 years later, an international research team searching for so-called ‘Spider’ pulsar systems – rapidly spinning neutron stars whose high-energy outflows are destroying their binary companion star, is at the core of a celestial object a gamma ray pulsar now known as PSR J2039?5617. The researchers utilized the the enormous computing power of the citizen science project Einstein@Home to track down the neutron star’s faint gamma-ray pulsations in data from NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope. Their results show that the pulsar is in orbit with a stellar companion about a sixth of the mass of our Sun. The pulsar is slowly but surely evaporating its companion star. The team also found that the companion’s orbit varies slightly and unpredictably over time.