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When some of the biggest stars reach the end of their lives, they explode in spectacular supernovas and leave behind incredibly dense cores called neutron stars. Some of these remnants emit powerful radio beams from their magnetic poles. As the star spins, these beams sweep past Earth and produce periodic pulses of radio waves, much like a cosmic lighthouse. This behaviour has earned them the name " pulsars". Pulsars typically spin incredibly fast, often completing a full rotation in just seconds – or even less. Over the last three years, some mysterious objects have emerged that emit periodic radio pulses at much slower intervals, which is hard to explain with our current understanding of neutron stars.

The Gamma Ray Sky - March 21st, 1998.

jocelyn bell burnell, 1967.

she finally got a $3m prize in 2018 and gave it all away to help underrepresented students become physicists!!

(i randomly discovered this while listening to an audiobook about the universe)

"PSR J1841−0500 is a pulsar... discovered in December 2008 by Fernando Camilo. [...] At the time of discovery, it was spinning once every 0.9 seconds. However, in 2009, it stopped emitting pulses completely. Most pulsars that stop emitting pulses only do so for a few minutes. But PSR J1841-0500 did so for 580 days. Then in August 2011, it started pulsing again." [source]

Figures from: "PSR J1841–0500: A RADIO PULSAR THAT MOSTLY IS NOT THERE" by Camilo et al. 2012

@hockeyblrpoetryclub ✨

I Changed Astronomy Forever. He Won the Nobel Prize for It.

Growing up in a Quaker household, Jocelyn Bell Burnell was raised to believe that she had as much right to an education as anyone else. But as a girl in the 1940s in Northern Ireland, her enthusiasm for the sciences was met with hostility from teachers and male students. Undeterred, she went on to study radio astronomy at Glasgow University, where she was the only woman in many of her classes.

You know sometimes you have a fact or a concept about the universe that you’d sort of vaguely brushed past a time or two but it never actually caught your brain in a way that sparked something before, until abruptly it does?

I was watching a Spacedock youtube video about pulsars in science fiction, and … I’ve heard of pulsars before, and this is the standard language around them, but I still never fully grasped until now the awesome concept that pulsars are lighthouse stars.

Pulsars are neutron stars, the superdense, compact remnants of supernovas, and they are super magnetised, and because they’re so tiny and so magnetic and rotating at such ridiculous speeds, that electromagnetic radiation is beaming out from their poles like twin lighthouse beams of radiation, causing the pulsar to appear to, well, pulse when the beam sweeps in our direction. They’re also so regular and so precise that they can and have been used as space navigation aids. Including on the Voyager Golden Disc map showing Earth’s position relative to 14 pulsars:

And. Look. You all know me and lighthouses from a standing start. The tangled ball of imagery around a beam of light in the darkness showing safe passage through the deadly chaos of the ocean. And. That, but in space. A star that is a lighthouse.

I don’t know why this never clicked for me before, but oh my god that is an image and a half.

And. So. For bonus points, because I love space horror so very, very much? There is a star system called PSR B1257+12 which was the first pulsar to have confirmed planets orbiting it. There’s three planets that have been confirmed so far. And in the mid-2010s during the Name Exo Worlds event, the public named this pulsar and its planets Lich, Draugr, Poltergeist and Phobetor. The star is named after an undead wizard, and its planets are named after various spirits, undead and nightmare creatures. So. Again. Just by the naming conventions, not any properties of the star itself (although pulsars, like all neutron stars, can be argued as undead given that they’re the remnants of supernovas), this is an undead lighthouse star. A ghostly stellar lighthouse, its twin beams sweeping the void, surrounded by three silent, undead worlds.

Please god tell me somebody’s written a space horror story with that concept? Because. *flails madly*

I think pulsars may be my new favourite type of star. And yes, I should have twigged this imagery years ago, pulsars have always been described as lighthouses, but still.