Z. Arzoumanian

At the core of the distant galaxy SDSS J1335+0728, 2.5 billion light-years from Earth, a supermassive black hole beats out a rhythm. Every few days it flares in X-rays like a cosmic metronome, but in 2025 that metronome suddenly shifted from allegro to andante.

After a supernova explosion, a neutron star neutron star remains: a city-sized ball of unimaginably dense matter, spinning hundreds of times per second. Any tiny bump on its surface would make it wobble like an off-balance spinning top, humming faintly through the fabric of space.

Pulsar PSR J0614-3329 spins 318 times per second. A point on its equator moves at about 10% of the speed of light. From a distance, the star looks like a lighthouse spinning so fast that its beam blurs into a continuous ring.