3 min readSep 24, 2026 08:37 PM IST
Using the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) at Khodad, 80 km from Pune, an international team of astronomers from India, the US, Germany and the UK discovered extraordinarily bright, microsecond-duration radio flashes from a rare type of neutron star.
The uGMRT (Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope) is a world-class, low-frequency radio telescope run by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), a unit of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), an aided institute under the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE).
The uGMRT is one of the world’s most sensitive radio telescopes, playing a pivotal role in key discoveries.
Neutron stars are extremely dense, leftover cores of giant stars that have exploded. A pulsar is a rapidly spinning, highly magnetised neutron star that emits radio waves from regions around both of its magnetic poles.
Saptarshi Sarkar, lead author of the study and a PhD student at NCRA-TIFR, and the team observed PSR J1227-4853 — which is an exceptionally rare kind of neutron star. Sarkar, when contacted, told The Indian Express that it is one of only three known transitional millisecond pulsars among more than 3,000 known ones.
The team explained that just as a lighthouse beam sweeps by at regular intervals, the pulsar’s radio light is detected periodically, revealing its intrinsic rotation rate. Hence catching a pulsar in this transitional act gives astronomers a rare chance to study how neutron stars evolve and according to Sarkar that is exactly what this observation offered.
PSR J1227-4853 spins an astonishing 592 times a second (that’s almost twice as fast as a regular kitchen blender!). The team patiently monitored the pulsar for about 174 hours over several years. From this enormous amount of data, 235 individual giant radio pulses were found.
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“What struck me most was just how extreme these pulses are, both in terms of their brightness and their short duration. Some flashes were nearly 1,000 times brighter than the pulsar’s normal emission, while the shortest lasted just 1.28 microseconds, about 100,000 times shorter than an eye blink! It is remarkable to see such intense and brief bursts of radio emission from a neutron star,” he added.
He further pointed out that there are around 20 pulsars including this one that are known to produce giant pulses. “So this is truly a case of the rarest of the rare,” he said.
Published in The Astrophysical Journal, the study establishes PSR J1227−4853 as a new laboratory for exploring how rapidly rotating neutron stars generate some of the brightest and shortest radio flashes known, and may help astronomers understand the diverse mechanisms behind the universe’s most extreme radio bursts.
Jayanta Roy, a co-author and an Associate Professor at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), attributed the discovery to the uGMRT’s high sensitivity, microsecond time resolution, and its ability to run long-term monitoring campaigns.
