Doyle Rice

USA TODAY

Astronomers have discovered a pulsar — the spinning remains of a once-massive star — that's 1,000 times brighter than previously thought possible, according to a new study.

At 50 million light years from Earth, the pulsar named NGC 5907 X-1 is also the most distant of its kind ever detected. It's in the spiral galaxy NGC 5907, also known as the Knife Edge Galaxy or Splinter Galaxy.

Pulsars were once huge stars that exploded as a powerful supernova at the end of their life, before becoming small and extremely dense stellar corpses.

The object was spotted by the XMM-Newton space observatory, a telescope that orbits the Earth and is owned by the European Space Agency.

The pulsar emits a pulse of radiation about once every second. If it's aligned with Earth, its pulses are like lighthouse beacons that appear to flash on and off as the pulsar rotates, the space agency said. In that one second, the pulsar emits the same amount of energy released by our sun every 3.5 years, according to EarthSky.com.

The energy released by the pulsar was a surprise to astronomers: "Something else is needed in our models in order to account for the enormous amount of energy released by the object," said Gian Luca Israel of the Astronomical Observatory of Rome in Italy, lead author of the study.

"The discovery of this very unusual object, by far the most extreme ever discovered in terms of distance, luminosity and rate of increase of its rotation frequency, sets a new record for XMM-Newton, and is changing our ideas of how such objects really 'work,'" said Norbert Schartel, a European Space Agency scientist.

The study was published online Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Science.