A Carbon Forge on a Windy Planet Around a Pulsar
A wind blowing against the planet's rotation stokes a carbon forge. That is what the atmosphere of PSR J2322-2650b looks like: a Jupiter-like companion to a millisecond pulsar.
A Pulsar Near an Old Cluster: Random Companion or One of the Family?
In the dense family of old stars that astronomers call the cluster NGC 6791, a lonely radio beacon has been spotted — the pulsar PSR J1922+3745. Such objects are born when a massive star explodes and its core collapses into a tiny sphere the size of a city, which spins and emits radio waves like a rotating lighthouse beam.
Neutron Gravita-Waltz and Dance with a Defect
Imagine two neutron stars, compressed to the size of a metropolis yet weighing one and a half Suns each. They whirl in an unrestrained gravitational dance, drawing together and flying apart every 4.4 hours. At periastron — the point of closest approach — only a couple of light-seconds separate them, and their speed reaches three and a half million kilometers per hour.