Part-time Pulsars: Another Milky Way Mystery

If you're a Physics Buzz regular, you've read about radio pulsars before (most recently here). A pulsar forms when a massive star explodes and its outer layers are blown away. The inside core contracts, resulting in an extremely dense, rapidly rotating neutron star. Pulsars have the strongest known magnetic fields in the universe, and beams of charged particles spew out from their magnetic poles. Like a lighthouse signal sweeping across the water, we detect pulsars by very regular radio pulses s...