Squeezed Nebula Outshines the Pulsar: The Secret of Cosmic Bellows express
Blacksmith's bellows fan the fire by forcefully pushing out air. In space, the shock wave from a supernova, a concept introduced by Fritz Zwicky, acts like such bellows: it catches up with a giant bubble of charged particles and magnetic fields formed around a spinning neutron star — a pulsar, compresses it, and the magnetic field intensifies. The particles accumulated inside start radiating much brighter — sometimes so much that the glow surpasses the power of the pulsar itself. This is called super-efficiency.
The new TIDE+L model has crunched through thousands of such systems and shown that there are an order of magnitude more ultra-bright nebulae in the Galaxy than previously thought. Especially in infrared and visible light, where old estimates were underestimated by several times. This explains the suspiciously bright objects discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
A super-efficient nebula can shine in visible light like an entire cluster of stars, even though it's powered by a single pulsar the size of a small asteroid.