When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.An illustration of a pulsar lurking in Galactic Center close to the supermassive black hole Sgr A*. | Credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva)Scientists suspect that a rapidly spinning, highly magnetic neutron star, or “pulsar,” dwells at the heart of the Milky Way. The discovery could change our understanding of how many of these extreme dead stars dwell close to our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*).Like all neutron stars, pulsars are born when stars with masses around that of the sun reach the end of their fuel for nuclear fusion and can no longer support themselves against gravitational collapse. Though the region of the Milky Way called the Galactic Center is expected to be replete with pulsars, spotting them is challenging because of how extreme, turbulent, and densely packed the heart of our galaxy is. However, radio waves aren’t obscured by this region to the same extent that visible light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation are.AdvertisementAdvertisementThat’s why the potential discovery of this pulsar was made by the Breakthrough Listen team, researchers who search the cosmos for radio signals that could represent “technosignatures” which might indicate the activity of intelligent alien life. The team conducted their radio wave search using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), an observatory in West Virginia, between 2021 and 2023. This led to the discovery of a pulsar candidate rotating around 122 times per second.Scientists behind the study say there were surprised by how few pulsars were found. “Our survey is one of the most sensitive ever conducted toward the Galactic Center,” team leader Karen Perez of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute said in a statement. “We should have been sensitive to approximately 10% of millisecond pulsars and 50% of canonical, slow pulsars, assuming the pulsar …
