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Experts at the European Space Agency (ESA) spotted the dead star, known as a neutron star, spinning in Andromeda, a galaxy close to us and with a similar structure to our own.

Neutron stars are the remnants of a massive star which has since died. Once they have died, they begin consuming the stars around them.

They are fairly common, but one has never been observed in Andromeda before.

The ESA has spent decades examining Andromeda for neutron stars but hasn’t found one until now.

The space agency was analysing data from the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope when it found evidence of a fast-spinning neutron star, which was rotating every 1.2 seconds and feeding on a nearby

star when it reached its closest orbit every 1.3 days.

Gian Luca Israel, one of the lead researchers, said: “We were expecting to detect periodic signals among the brightest X-ray objects in Andromeda, in line with what we already found during

the 1960s and 1970s in our own Galaxy.

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“But persistent, bright X-ray pulsars like this are still somewhat peculiar, so it was not completely a sure thing we would find one in Andromeda.

“We looked through archival data of Andromeda spanning 2000–13, but it wasn’t until 2015 that we were finally able to identify this object in the galaxy’s outer spiral in just two of the 35

measurements.” 

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