
Peculiar Pulsar Throws “Cosmic Cannonballs”
Astronomers think a city-size star that’s spinning faster than a kitchen blender is shooting out plasma torpedoes.

Astronomers Find Mysterious, Slowly Pulsing Star
An unidentified source has been beaming out a pulse of radio waves every 22 minutes since 1988.

Black Widow Pulsar Sets Mass Record
A pulsar has devoured enough of its stellar companion to grab the title for most massive known neutron star.

Seeing Inside a Cosmic Superaccelerator
Astronomers are exploring a celestial particle accelerator in the Eel Nebula that surrounds a distant pulsar.

Pulsar Shoots 7-light-year-long Phaser Blast
Nature proves truth is still stranger than fiction: A pulsar has shot energetic particles in a thin, straight line that extends for light-years into space. The discovery might explain how antimatter makes its way to Earth.

Crab Pulsar's Mystery Bursts Are Even More Powerful Than We Thought
The Crab Nebula pulsar has sporadically bursted for decades. Now, astronomers have found these mysterious bursts release even more energy than thought.

Pulsar Limits “Fifth Force” Interactions with Dark Matter
A recent experiment to better understand the nature of dark matter constrains a possible "fifth force" of nature to almost zero.

A Magnifying Glass for a Pulsar
Astronomers have discovered a pulsar that comes with its own magnifying glass — courtesy of its brown dwarf companion that’s being torn to shreds.

Two Pulsars Blowing in the Wind
New images of two pulsars show beautiful, complex clouds of charged particles that illustrate the power dynamics in and around these spinning neutron stars.

Pulsars' Gamma Rays Highlight Mysteries
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered that almost all of the highest energy photons in the Large Magellanic Cloud come from two pulsars.

Pulsar System to Put On a Show in 2018
Astronomers are looking forward to 2018, when a young pulsar will pass through its binary star companion’s disk.
Fermi Finds "Transformer" Pulsar
NASA's Fermi Space Telescope recently spotted a pulsar in a rare transitional phase as it devours the matter of its companion star.

Exotic Stellar Trio Includes Pulsar
Imagine a three-star system with two white dwarfs and a wildly spinning, superdense neutron star, all packed within a space no bigger than Earth's orbit.
Oddball Pulsar Origin?
A few whirling neutron stars might get their start as very different objects, at least if a new analysis is correct.
Pulsar on the Fence
Astronomers have discovered a neutron star that switches between X-ray and radio emission within a few days. The find is fabulous news for theorists, who have long predicted that the two pulsar types were connected.
New Pulsar Explores Heart of Milky Way
A pulsar discovered last April is helping astronomers measure the magnetic field surrounding our galaxy’s central black hole.

Pulsar Twitches Perplex Astronomers
New X-ray and radio observations detected a strange switcheroo in the radiation from a pulsar. The repeated hiccups have left scientists scratching their heads.

Fermi Tracks Gamma-ray Pulsars
What spins hundreds of times per second, has 100 trillion times the Sun's density, and spews lethal radiation all over interstellar space? Astronomers are closer to knowing the answers, thanks to NASA's newest deep-space observatory.
Dark Matter or Pulsars? Fermi is on the Case
Something funny is going on within a few hundred light-years of us, creating high-energy electrons that we don't understand. Recent data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope keep the mystery alive.
Surprising Trove of Gamma-Ray Pulsars
Pulsars flash in radio, but some of them flash a lot more powerfully in gamma rays, due to different processes happening in different places around them.