Researchers detect brightest pulsar ever recorded
Astronomers have detected a pulsating dead star that appears to be burning with the energy of 10 million suns, making it the brightest pulsar ever detected. The pulsar — a rotating, magnetized neutron star — was found in the galaxy Messier 82 (M82), a relatively close galactic neighbor that’s 12 million light-years from Earth. The exceptional brightness of the pulsar classifies it as an ultraluminous X-ray (ULX) source — an object so bright that it defies any known process of stellar radiation. Indeed, ULXs are scientific curiosities, and astronomers have proposed that such objects may be intermediate-mass black holes: not as small as stellar black holes, which have a mass five to 50 times that of our sun, but not as big as supermassive black holes, which are 100,000 to 1 billion times as massive as the sun. The extreme brightness of a ULX source could conceivably be generated by such a...