You Would Not Want to Be Near a Young Pulsar

There's a dead star out there spinning hundreds of times a second — and getting close to a young one would be a death sentence.

Pulsars are the crushed cores of exploded stars — packed into a sphere about 20 kilometres across. That's the size of a city. Yet they weigh more than our entire Sun, and a single teaspoon of their material would weigh about a billion tonnes on Earth.

When a massive star dies, its core collapses until neutrons are packed so tightly that quantum pressure is the only thing stopping it becoming a black hole. If that core spins and beams radiation from its magnetic poles, it's a pulsar. Most are detected by radio waves — harmless from a distance. But young, energetic pulsars like the Crab and the Vela also blast out X-rays and gamma rays, the highest-energy light there is. Get close to one of those — within a few light-years — and the radiation and magnetic forces would be lethal: enough to strip a planet's atmosphere and scour its surface. The good news? The nearest known pulsar to us is hundreds of light-years away. We are nowhere near the firing line.

Here's the part that should sit with you. Our galaxy may hold hundreds of millions of neutron stars — and we've detected only a few thousand pulsars among them. Most are silent to us, their beams simply pointing the wrong way. So somewhere out there in the dark, countless lighthouses are sweeping the galaxy right now — and we have no idea where most of them are pointing.

Follow The Cosmic Vault — the universe is stranger than you think.