The brightest pulsar ever recorded has been discovered by astronomers using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR.
Pulsars, or dead stars, are the remnants of a supernova. They belong to a class of stars known as neutron stars.
The size of the star is similar to the city of Pasadena, and has around the same mass as our sun.
Located around 12 million light years away from Earth in the Messier 82 galaxy, the pulsar is generating nearly ten million times the energy of the sun.
Astronomers had mistaken the dead star for a black hole, but on closer inspection they found that it was the brightest pulsar ever found.
Fiona Harrison, the NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California is quoted as saying: “This result will help us understand how black holes gorge and grow so quickly, which is an important event in the formation of galaxies and structures in the universe.”
Follow up observations by NASA’s Swift satellite and Chandra X-Ray Observatory will further analyze the special pulsar.
Experts think that the dead star might be the source of ultra luminous x-ray sources, which were previously thought to be only produced by black holes.
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