clipped from: www.abc.net.au   

An odd fast-spinning pulsar, which is locked in an elongated orbit around another star much like our Sun has left astronomers puzzled how such a system could have formed.

pulsar

Dr David Champion of CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility and colleagues report on pulsar J1903+0327, located about 21,000 light years from Earth, online today in Science Express.

Typical pulsars spin once a second to about 10 or 20 times a second but J1903+0327 is a "millisecond pulsar" and spins much faster.

J1903+0327
spins 465 times a second and is the fifth fastest-spinning pulsar known in our Galaxy, say Champion and colleagues, who found the star using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico
it has a very elongated orbit around a star similar in size and composition to our Sun

"What we have found is a millisecond pulsar that is in the wrong kind of orbit around what appears to be the wrong kind of star," says Champion. "Now we have to figure out how this strange system was produced."