Epic pulsar 50 EP

J1859+0026g

RA 284.9917° · Dec 0.4333° · pulsar

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges

50 pts · Epic

Epic 78 pts → Anomaly

Pulsar +22
Millisecond pulsar +20
Deeply embedded (high DM) +8

Total score 50

28 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

Pulsar · +22
Millisecond pulsar · +20
Deeply embedded (high DM) · +8

Trivia

Hard to believe

Surface speed. Its equator is moving at roughly 2% 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 334 — 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

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 July — 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.

Properties

dm: 334.1
name: J1859+0026g
period ms: 8.57

Nearby objects

About J1859+0026g

J1859+0026g is an epic pulsar. It spins once every 8.57 ms and has a dispersion measure of 334.1 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, J1859+0026g 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 J1859+0026g is an epic pulsar

J1859+0026g scores 50 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 28 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Pulsar, Millisecond 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.