Ultra-Fast Pulsar
Pulsars are rotating neutron stars , born in the violent crucibles of supernova explosions . Like cosmic lighthouses , beams of radiation from surface hotspots sweep past our viewpoint creating pulses which reveal the rotation rates of these incredibly dense stellar corpses . The most famous pulsar of all is found in the nearby supernova remnant, the Crab Nebula . The Crab's young pulsar is fast. Rotating at 33 times a second, its radiation energizes the surrounding gaseous stellar debris . But using archival observations from orbiting X-ray telescopes , astronomers have recently identified another “Crab-like” pulsar that is even faster. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) , X-ray pulses from this newly discovered pulsar, in the supernova remnant N157B , indicate an even faster rotation rate - 62 times a second - making it the fastest known pulsar associated with a supernova remnant . This contoured, false color X-ray image of a portion of the LMC shows the location of N157B along with the core of the nearby hot star cluster R136 , and the site of another Crab-like pulsar in SNR 0540-69.3 (rotating a mere 20 times a second). The image is about 1,500 light-years across.