Pulsar Neutron Star
This scene depicts a pulsar: the collapsed, city-sized core left behind after a massive star's supernova, packing more mass than the Sun into a sphere only tens of kilometers wide. Its intense magnetic field channels charged particles into two narrow beams of electromagnetic radiation that blast outward from the magnetic poles, which are tilted away from the spin axis. As the neutron star whips around many times per second, those beams sweep through space like a lighthouse, and if one crosses your line of sight it registers as a flash, or "pulse". Watch the glowing beams rotate, the star flash brighter each time a beam points toward the camera, and the faint looping magnetic field lines twist around the star as the swirling accretion particles orbit close to its surface.
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