The New Pulsing Star (The Pulsing Star Revised)

For the Millions of Pulsing Stars

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, when the universe was much wilder and younger, there lived a pulsar. The pulsar lived in its own little corner of the universe and was completely alone. Now, when I say “lived in its own little corner of the universe” I do not mean that the pulsar was literally in a corner of the universe. Science has shown us that the universe actually has no corners, but simply goes on and on and on until you get back to where you started. And no, it is not round like the earth. It is actually four-dimensional. To put it simply, it is completely beyond our current understanding. In fact, modern astronomical science is completely beyond the grasp of humans. We may discover certain facts, but these facts are far too outlandish for us to wrap our minds around. Some stars are so enormous that our sun could fit into them seven billion times. …Now can you really picture that? I know I can’t. So why do we bother learning the facts?

This story is desperate to tell itself, yet if I am to continue writing it (and you continue reading it) we need to establish that humankind will never comprehend everything about how things work. To try would be to judge the personality of a Great Blue Whale by examining one of his hairs. We will never be able to predict anything with complete accuracy. Heavenly bodies are so diverse in their nature: we will never be able to explain why they act certain ways, or why they orbit here instead of there. We will never know to what extent the bodies we can’t see are influencing the ones we can see. And we will never be able to compare the two and arrive at a nice, reasonable conclusion. But we try is because it’s human nature to hope to understand what we don’t. At least that is my guess. And my guess is as good as yours.

Pulsars are tiny stars made entirely of neutrons. Their name comes from the fact that some of them send radio waves out into space, like a lone lighthouse to the sea. The pulsar in our story, like all pulsars, was born when gas from a supernova came together and started to shift, combine, and condense to create a new form. Our particular pulsar was average: it weighed as much as the sun and was about nine and a half kilometers wide. As one can imagine, a body so heavy yet so small would be unimaginably dense. In fact, I believe pulsars might be the densest heavenly bodies in the universe (but that’s just my personal opinion).

Something as heavy as a pulsar attracts other bodies. Our scientists attribute this to gravity, which is one of their few laws that actually seems to exist with no exceptions. Gravity proposes that the more mass a body has, the more other bodies are drawn towards it. And so pulsars should naturally have other heavenly bodies orbiting around them: and here is where the scientist encounters his problem. For some reason we cannot comprehend, many pulsars do not. Many pulsars are completely alone in the universe. Why they remain solitary with so many bodies floating around in the sky remains a mystery to us. But just because we don’t know why it happens doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Our particular pulsar was one of these mysterious ones with no companions. It lived completely alone in its own little “corner” of the universe. And yet even this pulsar, who lived billions of light-years away from earth, was able to have been reached by our ever-probing curiosity. Our pulsar was discovered in 1982 by a man named Shrinivas Kulkarni. Shrinivas was a jack-of-all-trades when it came to astronomy. He had already discovered the “Brown Dwarfs” by the time he picked out our little pulsar from the rest of the sky. He dubbed it a “millisecond pulsar” because of the frantic pace at which it sent out its signals. And so, our pulsar became the very first of the millisecond pulsars, and was given the name PSR B1937+21. Shrinivas moved on and continued his successful work as an astronomer. In 2001 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, being one of only ten living Indians to receive this honor. He has now retired, and is a proud and well-liked man.

Since Shrinivas, millisecond pulsars have attracted many astronomers. Scientists make new observations on these abnormally fast pulsars every day. In fact, in 2005 our scientists unveiled PSR J1748-2446ad, a pulsar with the fastest spinning time yet recorded: 716 times per second. One Mississippi. That was one second. The pulsar just did 716 spins. Just why this pulsar goes so fast (and how long it can keep it up) is beyond our comprehension. But we do not mind: it feels good to have discovered such an abnormal heavenly body, and to announce its existence to the world so that all may scrutinize it in the night sky.

But that pulsar is not the focus of our story. Our pulsar, now known as PSR B1937+21, currently spins 614 times per second. I have said before that some pulsars send out radio signals into the vastness of the cosmos. Not all pulsars do this: our scientists have found many pulsars that are content to simply be; they don’t need to use radio waves to get by. But most pulsars, according to experts, do send out these signals. The first pulsar man discovered was located because of the signals it sent out, and so it was also with our own pulsar, who is far too distant and small to be seen by us here on earth. Though all the signals are typically radio waves, each pulsar produces its own signals a bit differently. We do not fully comprehend the nature of pulsar’s waves, or how they’re produced. But we have been able to lump pulsars into a few broad categories depending on some of the basic features their waves have. Our pulsar’s waves are fueled by the continual decaying of its inner magnetic core.

We do not know how long it takes PSR B1937+21’s waves to reach us, but we assume that by the time we can sense them they’re long in the past. As far as we know, PSR B1937+21 is still out there in its little “corner” of the universe, sending out signals all around itself at 614 times per second away into the emptiness of space.


Don Backer was thirty-nine and had no wife or children. He lived alone in his Californian house, although he was seldom there. He spent most of his hours (and all of his days) in the observatory where he worked. If you saw him on the street you would see a small man with disheveled brown hair and yellow teeth. Perhaps most noticeable would be his terrible posture.

However, the chances of anyone seeing Don outside slid downwards with each sunset. Every time he walked down the dirty streets children would laugh at him, s would walk past briskly or refuse to look at him, and teenagers would shout things that he couldn’t make out or didn’t understand. And so every time Don went out he was less inclined to ever go out again. And so as the years passed, so did Don gradually pass out of society. And Don stayed only in the observatory and his house.

Yet in 1982, even his house would fade away in the climax of Don’s work. Don had been putting all his time into his most recent discovery: signals from space that resembled a pulsar’s but were far too rapid to be from one. By now Don constantly dwelt within the observatory. Long after the other astronomers had cast away their instruments and had gone out to meet the evening, one could still find Don working away at his project in the dark laboratory. He would go from his machines to his desk to his instruments with only the meager light from his lamp to guide him.

Tonight Don Backer would finally be able to prove that the rapid signals came from an undiscovered type of pulsar. And yet for some reason he could not summon the excitement that was supposed to come naturally with new discoveries. Don sat at his desk, but instead of writing he paused, and started thinking. Stopping to think was a bad habit Don had been trying to overcome, but oftentimes his thoughts would overwhelm him. Why did he not feel any excitement? Where was his sense of accomplishment…? Don felt empty, and that frightened him because if he was empty, then that meant he had no purpose. Don quickly snapped out of it, however, and started to write down reasons why he might feel the way he did. After a few minutes, he came to the reasonable conclusion that it was lack of sleep.

“Well, I suppose the best option now would be to journey home and rest.”

Don sat in the dark room with only the hum of his machines acknowledging his decision. It would have been easy to put up his papers, turn off the light, and step out of the laboratory. But Don did not journey out into the brisk air of that night. Instead, Don went back to his machines, his pale hands quickly adjusting knobs and measurements in the darkness. After all, he was almost done with his project, and he wanted his notes to be so detailed that even Shrinivas couldn’t revise them.