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A rendering of a rapidly spinning pulsar in a binary system. A companion star is distorted by the pulsar’s enormous gravity and slowly but surely evaporating. Image: Knispel/Clark/Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics/NASA GSFC Using the computing power of the citizen-science project Einstein@Home to analyse data from NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope, researchers have identified a rapidly spinning pulsar, a so-called “black widow,” that is slowly but surely evaporating a companion star A paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society describes the analysis, showing t...

  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, ...

 E-Mail IMAGE: Artist's impression of PSR J2039?5617 and its companion. The binary system consists of a rapidly rotating neutron star view more  Credit: Knispel/Clark/Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics/NASA GSFC An international research team including members from The University of Manchester has shown that a rapidly rotating neutron star is at the core of a celestial object now known as PSR J2039?5617 The international collaboration used novel data analysis methods and the enormous computing power of the citizen science project Einstein@Home to track down the neutron s...