Baoda Li

Rhythmic flashes of a lighthouse in thick fog: that's what searching for pulsars looks like. The lighthouse spins, and its beam periodically sweeps across the telescope. But the fog smears the light, making the period seem slightly different. If the same lighthouse was observed twice, you can compare: the periods should nearly match, and the smearing should be similar.

Globular clusters, dense swarms of hundreds of thousands of stars, hide millisecond pulsars. These are dead stars spinning at breakneck speed: one rotation every few milliseconds, like a kitchen blender on max.