When a star explodes and dies in a supernova, it takes on a new life of sorts.
Pulsars are the extremely rapidly rotating objects left over after massive stars have exhausted their fuel supply.
Pulsars emit beams of radio waves from their poles.
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It may be even brighter than those within it.
Why wasnt PSR J0523-7125 discovered before?
Source: Youtube/NASA.
There are more than 3,300 radio pulsars known.
Of these, 99% reside within our galaxy.
Many were discovered with CSIROs famous Parkes radio telescope,Murriyang, in New South Wales.
About 30 radio pulsars have been found outside our galaxy, in the Magellanic Clouds.
So far we dont know of any in more distant galaxies.
Astronomerssearch for pulsars by looking for their distinctive repeating signals in radio telescope data.
This is a computationally intensive task.
We now know PSR J0523-7125 has an extremely wide beam, and thus escaped detection.
So how were we able to find it?
Our eyes cant distinguish between polarised and unpolarised light.
This was unexpected and exciting, since there was no known pulsar or dwarf star at this position.
We figured the object must be something new.
We observed it with many different telescopes, at different wavelengths, to try and solve the mystery.
Yet we detected nothing.
The object couldnt be a star, as stars would be visible in optical and infrared light.
It was unlikely to be a normal pulsar, as the pulses would have been detected by Parkes.
Even the Gemini telescope didnt provide an answer.
Our analysis also confirmed its location within the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160,000 light-years away.
Extreme pulsars are one of the missing pieces in the vast picture of the pulsar population.
Well need to find more of them before we can truly understand pulsars within the framework of modern physics.
This discovery is just the beginning.
ASKAP has now finished its pilot surveys and is expected to launch into full operational capacity later this year.
