Rare pulsar 34 EP

J0823+0159

RA 125.7907° · Dec 1.9868° · pulsar

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Score breakdown

· 2 badges

34 pts · Rare

Rare 50 pts → Epic

Pulsar +22
Binary pulsar +12

Total score 34

16 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

Pulsar · +22
Binary pulsar · +12

Trivia

Handle with care

Its gravity. Surface gravity is around 190 billion times Earth's. A fall of one metre would end at roughly a tenth of the speed of light.

What it actually is

What it is. The collapsed core of a star that exploded: about one and a half Suns of matter crushed into a ball the size of a city, held up only by the refusal of neutrons to be squeezed further.
Reading the fog. Its dispersion measure is 23.7 — a count of the free electrons in every column of space between here and there. Those electrons slow the low-frequency pulses more than the high ones, and that lag is how its distance is worked out.
It has a partner. It orbits a companion star, and because its pulses are such a precise clock the orbit can be traced to extraordinary accuracy. A binary pulsar is how gravitational waves were first proven to be real, decades before one was directly detected.

Find it in the sky

Seen from everywhere. It sits almost on the celestial equator, so it can be seen from essentially anywhere on Earth.
Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around January — that's when to go looking.

Standing on it

Why we can see it. We only know about it because its beam happens to sweep across the Earth. Most of the galaxy's pulsars are pointing somewhere else and are invisible to us.

By the numbers

Density. A sugar-cube of its core would weigh about a billion tonnes — as much as every car on Earth put together.

Properties

binary: yes
bsurf: 304290525300
dm: 23.727
name: J0823+0159
period ms: 864.8728

Nearby objects

About J0823+0159

J0823+0159 is a rare pulsar. It spins once every 864.873 ms, has a dispersion measure of 23.73 pc cm⁻³ and carries a surface magnetic field around 3.04×10^11 G.

The collapsed core of a star that exploded: about one and a half Suns of matter crushed into a ball the size of a city, held up only by the refusal of neutrons to be squeezed further.

How to see it

Like any astronomical target, J0823+0159 is best seen from a dark site away from city lights, and when it is above the horizon depends on your latitude and the time of year. The visibility panel above works out tonight's viewing window for your saved location.

Why J0823+0159 is a rare pulsar

J0823+0159 scores 34 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 16 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 2 science badges — Pulsar and Binary pulsar — each earned for a real, measurable property of the object. Rarity on Spacedle is never random: the more remarkable an object's astrophysics, the more badges it collects, the higher it scores, and the rarer it ranks.