The mystery of part-time pulsars
Thursday, January 5, 2017 - 10:31
in Astronomy & Space
A new discovery has upended the widely held view that all pulsars are orderly ticking clocks of the universe. A survey done at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has fortuitously discovered two extremely strange pulsars that undergo a "cosmic vanishing act." Sometimes they are there, and then for very long periods of time, they are not.