A neutron star pulsing light with the energy of 10 million suns has been found by researchers including an Italian scientist who trained in Cagliari.
The findings, published in the journal Nature, were made by a team of scientists led by Matteo Bachetti as well as NASA staff, using the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR).
Bachetti, who studied in Cagliari, has been working with the astrophysics research centre at the University of Toulouse in France. The neutron star, or pulsar, was initially thought to be a black hole.
But the new discovery by astronomers has led them to conclude that the pulsar is the remnant of a supernova that was found in the Cigar Galaxy, also known as Messier 82 (M82), about 12 million light-years away from Earth.
"When I saw the pulse, I could not believe it, for days I thought it was a mistake and tried to learn what was the source close to M82 that could have contaminated the data," said Bachetti.
"But the only way to obtain a pulse so fast and so is stable is to have a pulsar, that is, a neutron star".
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