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About 7000 light years away, a pulsar is under the magnifying glass. This rapidly spinning stellar corpse is known as 鈥渢he black widow鈥�, because it is slowly devouring its neighbouring star. And what鈥檚 left over has now let us zoom in to see the pulsar up close.

The black widow pulsar, officially called B1957+20, rotates more than 600 times a second, sweeping the sky with a beam of light as it turns. It orbits its partner, a brown dwarf star, once every 9.2 hours. Because they are so close together, the brown dwarf is constantly bombarded by powerful radiation from the pulsar, which strips matter off the brown dwarf and leaves a cloud of ionised plasma in its wake.

at the University of Toronto in Canada, and his colleagues found that when the pulsar鈥檚 light passed through the edge of the cloud, the plasma acted as a magnifying glass, boosting some frequencies of light up to 80 times their original brightness.

鈥淚t provides you a tool to zoom in on the emission and see exactly where it鈥檚 coming from,鈥� says at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Main and his colleagues used this magnification effect to distinguish two zones of powerful radiation only about 20 kilometres apart in the pulsar鈥檚 atmosphere. At that distance, it鈥檚 like measuring the width of a hair on the surface of Mars, Hessels says.

That magnifying power may help us figure out what mechanism causes pulsars鈥� beams of light. It also might help us understand fast radio bursts (FRBs), which are extremely brief, bright radio signals that flash from distant space but have never been explained.

The way that the plasma distorted the pulsar鈥檚 light was similar to distortions we see in the light of FRB 121102, the only FRB that鈥檚 ever been observed to repeat. FRB 121102 seems to come from a distant galaxy, but nevertheless appears extremely bright from Earth. If clouds of plasma are magnifying its light and that of other similar FRBs, that might explain how they could be so far away and yet burst so brightly in the sky.

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