NASA’s Fermi Satellite Clocks a ’Cannonball’ Pulsar

Astronomers using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have found a pulsar hurtling through space at nearly 2.5 million miles an hour -- so fast it could travel the distance between Earth and the Moon in just 6 minutes. Pulsars are superdense, rapidly spinning neutron stars left behind when a massive star explodes. This one, dubbed PSR J0002 6216 (J0002 for short), sports a radio-emitting tail pointing directly toward the e