pulsar

When your computer glitches, the screen might freeze up for a few seconds before rapidly skipping ahead to correct itself. When a neutron star glitches, much the same thing happens — except, in this case, the screen is a swirling magnetic field 3 trillion times the size of Earth’s. Neutron stars — dense, quick-spinning corpses of once-giant stars that pack about 1.5 times the mass of the sun into a ball with a diameter about as long as Manhattan — are always baffling. But the roughly 5% of neutron stars that are known to “glitch,” or suddenly spin faster for … Read more