A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star that beams radiation from its magnetic poles, sweeping past Earth like a lighthouse to produce regular pulses, some hundreds of times per second. Their clock-like precision makes them superb cosmic instruments: arrays of pulsars act as a galaxy-sized detector that recently revealed a background hum of gravitational waves, and timing them tests gravity to exquisite accuracy.
Signals & Anomalies · Magnetars · Radio Astronomy
A stellar corpse in the Scutum arm pulses in radio waves and X-rays every 44 minutes. It does not behave like a magnetar, a pulsar, or a white dwarf. ...
Astrophysics · Gravitational Waves · Pulsar Timing
Earth is bobbing up and down in a sea of gravitational waves that stretches from one end of the cosmos to the other. We have no instrument on Earth bi...