A tiny pulsar with hardly any power is somehow blasting out gamma rays just as strong as the big ones, which totally breaks our physics models.
arXiv · March 17, 2026 · 2603.15537
The Takeaway
Scientists found a pulsar that should be a low-power engine but is somehow accelerating particles to the absolute physical limit. It is the cosmic equivalent of finding a lawnmower engine that can somehow push a car to supersonic speeds, challenging our understanding of how these stars power the universe.
From the abstract
Pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) are bubbles of relativistic particles, powered by the rotational energy loss of the central pulsars. The Crab Nebula, powered by the Milky Way's most energetic pulsar, was discovered by the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) as a PeV gamma-ray emitter, thereby establishing it as an extreme particle accelerator along with multiwavelength observations. Here we report LHAASO's detection of a point-like ultrahigh-energy (UHE, photon energy $E>100\,$TeV) ga