An object scientists thought was a black hole is actually the brightest and weirdest pulsar ever detected.
“This compact little stellar remnant is a real powerhouse,” says Fiona Harrison, professor of physics at California Institute of Technology and principal investigator with NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR).
“We’ve never seen anything quite like it. We all thought an object with that much energy had to be a black hole.”
With its extreme energy, this pulsar takes the top prize in the weirdness category, says Dom Walton, a postdoctoral scholar who works with NuSTAR data.
Pulsars are typically between one and two times the mass of the sun. The new pulsar presumably falls in that same range but shines about 100 times brighter than theory suggests something of its mass should be able to.
“We’ve never seen a pulsar even close to being this bright,” Walton says. “Honestly, we don’t know how this happens, and theorists will be chewing on it for a long time.” Besides being weird, the finding will help scientists better understand a class of very bright X-ray sources, called ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs).
NuSTAR’s detection of this first ultraluminous pulsar is described in a paper published in the current issue of Nature.
