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One of the most extreme stars in the Milky Way has just gotten even weirder. Scientists have measured the mass of a neutron star named PSR J0952-0607, and found that it is the most massive neutron star ever discovered, registering 2.35 times the mass of the Sun. If true, this is very close to the theorized upper mass limit of about 2.3 solar masses for neutron stars, which is an excellent laboratory for studying these ultra-dense stars at what we think are on the verge of collapse, in hopes of better understanding. strange quantum states of the matter they are made of. “We know roughly how matter behaves at nuclear densities, such as in the nuclei of uranium atoms,” said astrophysicist Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley. “A neutron star is like one giant core, but when you have one and a half solar masses of this material, which is about 500,000 Earth masses of cores all stuck together, it’s not at all clear how they’re going to behav...

Deep in the Milky Way, roughly 22,000 light-years from Earth, a star unlike any other roars with a magnetic force that beats anything physicists have ever seen. With 1.6 billion Tesla, a pulsar called Swift J0243.6+6124 broke the previous record of around 1 billion Tesla, found in the vicinity of pulsars GRO J1008-57 and 1A 0535+262. For a little context, your average new fridge magnet comes in at around 0.001 Tesla. More powerful MRI machines manage to reach around 3 Tesla. A few years ago, engineers were credited with hitting the semi-respectable 1,200 Tesla, keeping it in a flash of just 100 microseconds. So it makes sense that 1.6 billion Tesla would demand some truly amazing physics. The kind that can only be achieved by massive objects crammed into impossible volumes and spinning at incredible speeds, fast enough to accelerate electrons to ridiculous speeds. Swift J0243.6+6124 is already considered a noteworthy star. A type of super-compact cosmic heavyweight known as a pulsar...

Astronomers at MIT and universities in Canada and the United States have detected a strange and persistent radio signal from a distant galaxy that seems to flicker with surprising regularity. The signal is classified as a rapid radio burst, or FRB — a very powerful burst of radio waves of unknown astrophysical origin, which usually lasts a few milliseconds at most. However, this new signal lasted up to three seconds, about 1,000 times longer than the FRB average. Within this window, the team detected bursts of radio waves that repeated every 0.2 seconds in a clear periodic pattern, similar to a heartbeat. The researchers have labeled the signal FRB 20191221A, and it is currently the most durable FRB, with the clearest periodic pattern, detected to date. The source of the signal lies in a distant galaxy, a few billion light years from Earth. Exactly what the source is remains a mystery, although astronomers suspect the signal could be from a radio pulsar or a magnetar, both types of ...