The fastest known star spins 716 times every second
A neutron star the size of a city whirls so fast its equator moves at a quarter of the speed of light, and it still holds together.
Pulsars are spinning neutron stars that sweep beams of radio waves across space like cosmic lighthouses, and astronomers time their flashes with extraordinary precision. The current speed champion is PSR J1748-2446ad, found in the globular cluster Terzan 5 about 28,000 light-years away.
It rotates 716 times every second, or 716 hertz, shattering a record that had stood for 23 years. That is faster than a kitchen blender, achieved by an object more massive than the Sun.
At that spin rate, a point on the star’s equator is travelling at nearly a quarter of the speed of light.
The fact that the star is not flung apart tells physicists it must be extremely compact, with a radius under about 16 kilometres, and helps pin down how matter behaves when packed denser than an atomic nucleus. Pulsars like this one effectively turn the cosmos into a natural laboratory for testing the limits of ultra-dense matter.
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