To understand what the compact object in the centre of the nebula is, we have to go back in time. The story began with this young graduate student at Cambridge, Jocelyn Bell 
In 1967, she noticed a strange “bit of scruff” in the data from the radio telescope she had built for her project, designed by her thesis supervisor Anthony Hewish, to study quasars
The signal, extremely periodic in nature, wasn't from a quasar, and after a careful investigation she could rule out manmade sources.
It was even speculated whether they detected a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization "little green men" 😮👽
Soon they discovered more such radio pulses. It was later understood that the source was a beam of radiation, sweeping the Earth like a lighthouse, from a rotating compact star, a #pulsar
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