Brightest Pulsar to Date Shines with the Energy of 10 Million Stars

A pulsating star that appears to shine with the energy of 10 million stars may just be one of many in space. Scientists have uncovered the brightest pulsar to date and believe that many more of these exceedingly bright rotating neutron stars could be waiting to be discovered.

"Detecting pulsations in faint sources is challenging, because the X-ray data are not always collected with sufficiently high time-resolution to make the measurement," said Deepto Chakrabarty, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Our discovery will now justify the additional effort required to make such timing observations."

Previously, researchers believed that this type of "ultraluminous X-ray source" (ULX) was actually likely to be made of black holes five to 50 times more massive than our sun. Yet this latest discovery that at least one ULX source is a pulsar shows that there may be far more pulsars out there than expected.

"Black holes are unable to produce coherent pulsations like what we are seeing here," said Chakrabarty.

So how can a pulsar shin so brightly? That's a good question. The researchers hope to answer it with future studies and future experimental observations.

"It is clear that some sort of specialized beaming may be going on here, but coming up with a sensible and self-consistent pictures may be a challenge," said Chakrabarty. "Observing some more examples of ULX pulsars could be very helpful in sorting this out, giving us some different sets of system parameters to work with."

The findings are published in the journal Nature.