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Anomaly pulsar 104 EP

J1748-2446ad

RA 267.0200° · Dec -24.7792° · pulsar

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
104 pts · Anomaly
Anomaly 120 pts → Mythic
  • Record-breaking spin +50
  • Pulsar +22
  • Millisecond pulsar +20
  • Binary pulsar +12
Total score 104

16 more points to reach Mythic.

Badges

  • Pulsar · +22
  • Millisecond pulsar · +20
  • Record-breaking spin · +50
  • Binary pulsar · +12

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • Record spin. It completes a full rotation in 1.4 milliseconds — faster than a kitchen blender, on an object heavier than the Sun.
  • Surface speed. Its equator is moving at roughly 15% of the speed of light. Spin it much faster and it would tear itself apart.
  • Better than a clock. Millisecond pulsars keep time so well that a network of them is being used as a galaxy-sized detector for gravitational waves — more stable over decades than the best atomic clocks.

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 236 — 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

  • Southern sky. It rides the southern half of the sky — an easier target the further south you are.

Properties

binary
yes
dm
235.6
name
J1748-2446ad
period ms
1.396

Nearby objects

About J1748-2446ad

J1748-2446ad is an anomaly pulsar. It spins once every 1.396 ms and has a dispersion measure of 235.6 pc cm⁻³.

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, J1748-2446ad 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 J1748-2446ad is an anomaly pulsar

J1748-2446ad scores 104 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the anomaly tier. Another 16 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Pulsar, Millisecond pulsar, Record-breaking spin 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.