Like cosmic lighthouses sweeping the universe with bursts of energy, pulsars have fascinated and baffled astronomers since they were first discovered 50 years ago. In two studies, international teams ...

Pulsar array artist’s impression of how NANOGrav observes pulsars in an effort detect gravitational waves. (Courtesy: NANOGrav/T Klein) The observation of tiny deviations in the arrival times of radio ...

Neutron stars are so named because in the simplest of models they are made of neutrons. They form when the core of a large star collapses, and the weight of gravity causes atoms to collapse. Electrons ...

A little bit of “scruff” in scientific data 50 years ago led to the discovery of pulsars — rapidly spinning dense stellar corpses that appear to pulse at Earth. Astronomer Jocelyn Bell made the chance ...

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of "Ask a Spaceman" and "Space Radio," and author of "How t o Die in Space." Astronomers hope to use pulsars ...

This visualization shows 294 gamma-ray pulsars, first plotted on an image of the entire starry sky as seen from Earth and then transitioning to a view from above our galaxy. The symbols show different ...

The article recounts Jocelyn Bell Burnell's 1967 discovery of highly regular radio signals, initially termed "scruff" and briefly "LGM-1," which led to the identification of pulsars as rapidly ...

Here’s a bit of science history that genuinely surprised many of us here at Ars Technica. We all know the famous story of how Jocelyn Bell-Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967 as a graduate student at ...

Researchers have apparently found a "missing link" between two types of pulsars. Pulsars are fast-spinning neutron stars, the superdense, collapsed cores left over from the explosive deaths of massive ...

Although it’s possible for space missions to communicate data with Earth, the process is anything but fast. Voyager 1, for example, takes about 19 hours to send a signal back to Earth, and that lag ...