6500 light years from Earth
the Black Widow pulsar is slowly destroying its partner,
an unlucky Brown Dwarf.
 
The pulsar itself is a rapidly rotating neutron star
the size of Manhattan and spinning 625 times every second.
 
It launched radio beams that point at Earth once every rotation
and when this pulsing signal is converted to sound
we find that the Black Widow pulsar is usually humming a steady E-flat note
but sometimes you can hear it flicker
What could be causing that?
The answer is in the Brown Dwarf's tail.
The long comet-like tail is formed by gas
that's blasted off the surface by intense winds from the pulsar.
Every 9 hours, the pulsar's radio beam passes through the gas of the tail
on its way to Earth.
In May of 2018 a team at the University of Toronto led by Robert Main
used this to do something incredible.
They found that the tail acts like a giant magnifying lens
sometimes brightening the light from the pulsar up to 40 times.
This causes the flicker you can hear in the pulsar's signal.
 
Robert and his team used this to see two regions that are 20km apart,
from many trillions of km away.
It's like seeing a human hair on the surface of Mars from Earth
which makes it one of the highest resolution observations
in the history of astronomy.
