PSR J1748-2446ad
17th April, 2026.
PSR J1748-2446ad is the fastest known spinning pulsar, which spins at an incredible rate of 716.35 times a second! This would mean it would spin 42,981 times in a minute. For a comparison, our sun rotates on average once every 27 days. This makes the pulsar rotate 1.67 billion times faster than our sun. At the equator, the pulsar is spinning at approximately 24% of the speed of light, or over 70,000km per second.
The pulsar is located in a globular cluster of stars called Terzan 5, roughly 18,000 light years away. It’s part of a binary system, and does have frequent eclipses, which orbits each other in a 26-hour period. The other object is a presently un-named star, with a weight of 0.14 solar masses, and a radius of 5-6 that of the sun. Suggesting, that it may be a bloated main-sequence star, possibly still filling it’s Roche Lobe (a teardrop region surrounding a star in a binary system, in which orbiting material is gravitationally bound to that star.)
The pulsar was originally discovered by Jason W.T. Hessels of McGill University, on November 10th, 2004, and confirmed on January 8th, 2005. With a radius of less than 16km across, it’s solar mass is somewhat smaller than 2 M☉.
> Pictured Right> The location of the pulsar in the night sky. It is located in the center of the yellow square, but too faint to be visible against the background.
Credit: GALEX GR6/7 Data Release
A video simulating roughly what the pulsar would sound like, based on NASA information.
Credit: Sunstract.
A diagram of a pulsar from a PDF about Pulsars by James Latimer, credited to the Handbook Of Pulsar Astronomy, by Lorimer and Kramer.