Amaris McCarver, an intern in the Remote Sensing Division of the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), and a group of astronomers have discovered a rapidly spinning neutron star that shoots radiation beams across the universe akin to a cosmic lighthouse.
The fast spinning neutron star, or “pulsar”, is located within the tight star cluster Glimpse-C01. According to Space, this star cluster is located 10,700 light-years from Earth in the Milky Way’s galactic plane.
Furthermore, this millisecond pulsar, which spins hundreds of times per second, is the first of its sort to be discovered in the Glimpse-C01 star cluster. The Very Large Array (VLA) detected the pulsar known as GLIMPSE-C01A on February 27, 2021. But until McCarver and associates discovered it in the summer of 2023, it was hidden amid a mountain of data.
McCarver and her team discovered the item while examining photos from the VLA’s Low-band Ionosphere and Transient Experiment (VLITE) to search for new pulsars in 97 star clusters.
“Seeing a speculative project come to fruition so early in my career was exciting,” McCarver, one of 16 interns in the NRL DC branch’s Radio, Infrared, and Optical Sensors Branch, said in a statement.
