Occasionally, when a massive star dies in a supernova, it can leave behind a dense, rapidly spinning core known as a pulsar. These extreme o
The Lighthouse pulsar is relatively young - with a “spin-down” age (a method for calculating how old a pulsar is) of only 63 kyr (kiloyears). Since it’s so young, it’s also extremely high energy, and is rotating 16 times a second. For anyone unfamiliar with pulsar physics, that was not a typo - the entire star remnant rotates every 63 milliseconds. But what is perhaps most fascinating about the Lighthouse pulsar is its linear speed - it is rocketing through the Milky Way at an astonishing 990 kilometers per second. That is also not a typo - this pulsar is likely twice the mass of our Sun, but it’s also probably only about as wide as Manhattan is tall. And it’s traveling through our galaxy at almost 1000 km/second.