With 300 pulsars under regular observation, no other observatory can match Jodrell Bank in its contribution to probing these enigmatic objects. Among the highlights of this work is the role of the Lovell Telescope in the discovery of ultrafast 'millisecond' pulsars, spinning hundreds of times a second. Millisecond pulsars are believed to be long-dead pulsars which have been brought back to life in binary systems. Gas from a companion star spills on to the neutron star, spinning it up like a top to very high speeds. One of the most surprising discoveries of the Lovell Telescope was the finding of pulsars in globular star clusters.
Globular clusters are spherical swarms of hundreds of thousands of old stars.
Because the clusters are among the oldest objects in the Galaxy, astronomers had assumed that any pulsars would have faded away long ago. So in 1986 it came as a great surprise when the Lovell Telescope discovered a millisecond pulsar in a cluster known as Messier 28. Over a period of years the positions of the nearer pulsars are seen to be changing as they move across the sky. Astronomers were very surprised to find that about half of all new-born pulsars are moving so fast that they will escape the gravitational pull of our Galaxy and be lost in the darkness of intergalactic space. A not so new star On 19 February 1992 a bright, new star appeared in the constellation of Cygnus.