Newly discovered pulsar is 20 times faster than Crab pulsar

Of the more than three hundred known radio pulsars in our galaxy, the most recently discovered is surely the strangest. On 12 November, a group of radio astronomers led by Donald Backer (Berkeley) announced by International Astronomical Union telegram that they had found a pulsar in the constellation Vulpecula with a period of 1.558 milliseconds—twenty times shorter than that of the Crab pulsar, the fastest pulsar previously seen. The period of the first recorded pulsar, 1.337 seconds, discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell and her colleagues at Cambridge, is much more typical.