Mind-Blowing Discovery! Navy Intern Finds Ultra-Fast Spinning Neutron Star | Space News #5

New star alert! We present a remarkable finding found by a young intern at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in this exciting episode of Space News. Amaris McCarver and a group of astronomers have discovered a fast-spinning neutron star, or pulsar, in the compact star cluster Glimpse-CO1, which is situated in the galactic plane of the Milky Way some 10,700 light-years away. GLIMPSE-C01A is a millisecond pulsar, the first of its kind in this star cluster, spinning hundreds of times per second. First discovered by the Very Large Array in 2021, McCarver and her colleagues only discovered it in the summer of 2023 among a plethora of data.
Particularly millisecond pulsars, which are interesting cosmic objects, are excellent laboratories for researching physics in harsh environments. They are useful as cosmic watches because of their incredibly accurate timing, which allows them to measure the minute distortions brought on by gravitational waves. Exciting potential uses for this precision exist, such serving as the foundation for a "celestial GPS" for space travel.