What are pulsars?

A pulsar is like a cosmic lighthouse that blinks on and off super fast.

Imagine you're playing with a flashlight in a dark room. Every time you turn it on, light fills the room, then you turn it off, and it goes dark again. Now imagine doing this millions of times every second! That’s what a pulsar does, but instead of light, it sends out radio waves, which we can detect with special machines.

A pulsar is actually a super-dense star, like a spinning top made of neutrons. It spins really fast, and as it spins, it shoots out beams of energy from its poles, just like a lighthouse. When those beams point toward us, we see a flash, when they turn away, we don’t. That’s why we get the blinking effect.

These stars are what's left after a big star explodes, and they’re so heavy that they're packed into a tiny space, about the size of a city! They spin like a merry-go-round, and sometimes they even change speed, just like how your toy car might slow down or speed up.