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A star 300 light-years away dances with an invisible partner. One side of the star heats up more than the other, as if the unseen dancer is breathing a hot wind onto it. This partner is a neutron star — a city-sized cinder so dense a teaspoon of its matter outweighs Mount Everest. Its fierce particle wind, focused by a magnetic field a trillion times stronger than Earth's, creates a glowing hot spot on the facing surface.

Neutron stars form when massive stars explode as supernovae. Spotting one nearby helps track ancient blasts that scattered rare elements, like iron-60 in ocean floors. Astronomers detected this hidden partner through measurements of the star's wobble and splitting its light into a rainbow. Focusing on a specific hydrogen glow revealed the hot spot. The pattern points to a neutron star wind; a white dwarf (another stellar corpse) can't produce the heating without extra energy. First predicted by Fritz Zwicky in 1934, neutron stars were discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967 as pulsing radio signals.