Pulsar
From Slackerpedia Galactica
Pulsars are spinning neutron stars, spinning many hundreds of times per second, emitting radio signals in the process.
Pulsars were originally mistaken for Little Green Men but this idea was quickly rejected in favour of an even more outlandish idea -- that they are the rapidly-spinning, collapsed remnants of massive stars, in a package just a few kilometers across. These objects, known as Neutron stars, have intense magnetic fields. If their magnetic poles happen to sweep across the Earth's line of sight as they rotate, we see a burst of radiation -- a pulse -- emitted by charged particles spiraling through the magnetic fields. Hence, pulsar. Pulsars were first discovered in large part through the dissertation work of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, then a graduate student of astronomy in 1967, working under Antony Hewish at Cambridge University.
There are a number of types of pulsar, depending on the radiation they emit, for example the creatively named X-ray pulsars.
