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Uncommon pulsar 30 EP

J1556-5358

RA 239.2146° · Dec -53.9819° · pulsar

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Score breakdown

· 2 badges
30 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Pulsar +22
  • Deeply embedded (high DM) +8
Total score 30

4 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Pulsar · +22
  • Deeply embedded (high DM) · +8

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 436 — 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.

Find it in the sky

  • Southern sky. It rides the southern half of the sky — an easier target the further south you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around May — 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.
  • Spin. It whirls around 1 times every second, and it has kept that beat to better than a millionth of a second.

Properties

bsurf
3257809464000
dm
436
name
J1556-5358
period ms
994.6807

Nearby objects

About J1556-5358

J1556-5358 is an uncommon pulsar. It spins once every 994.681 ms, has a dispersion measure of 436 pc cm⁻³ and carries a surface magnetic field around 3.26×10^12 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, J1556-5358 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 J1556-5358 is an uncommon pulsar

J1556-5358 scores 30 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 4 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 2 science badges — Pulsar and Deeply embedded (high DM) — 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.