Scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory have announced the discovery of a superdense star spinning at more than 60 times per second, and calculate it could have been spinning as fast as 150 times per second or more when it formed some 4,000 years ago. To put it in perspective, this pulsar is spinning more than six million times as rapidly as the Earth. The team announced the discovery through a circular distributed Thursday by the International Astronomical Union.
Pulsars get their name because their emissions appear to turn on and off, or pulse, very rapidly.
Astronomers believe the stars channel some of their energy into a beam of radiation and as the star spins the beam sweeps through space like a lighthouse beacon. By counting how rapidly the beam flashes at Earth, scientists can calculate a pulsar's rate of spin. When a star explodes as a supernova it leaves behind a lingering core perhaps no more than 15 miles across but packed with as much matter as in our sun. Since the Crab pulsar's discovery in 1968, astronomers have spotted pulsars spinning as fast as hundreds of times per second. Its discovery confirms a prediction published by Gotthelf and colleague Q. Daniel Wang of Northwestern University.