Astronomers have discovered the most energetic pulses of radiation emissions ever detected.

The record-breaking pulsar, 6,500-light-years away, appeared from neutron star in the center of the supernova of 1054 AD.

Known as the Crab pulsar, it is the corpse left over when the star that created the Crab nebula exploded as a supernova.

The discovery challenges current theories about how neutron stars operate, according to scientists.

The neutron star (red sphere) with its strong magnetic field (white lines) spins around itself nearly 30 times per second injecting energetic electrons in the space region around it. The green and blue shaded regions depict different particle acceleration zones from where the detected photons could originate

The pulses were found by researchers working with the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov (Magic) observatory in the Canary Islands.

They believe the pulsar has a mass of 1.5 the mass of the sun concentrated in about 10km diameter object, rotates 30 times per second.

It is surrounded by a huge magnetic field ten thousand billion times stronger than that of the sun.

This field is strong enough to dominate the motion of charges and forces them to rotate at the same rate as the stellar surface. This region is called the magnetosphere.

The rotation of the magnetic field also generates intense electric fields that tear electrons from the surface.

As these accelerated electrons stream outward, they produce beams of radiation that we receive every time the beam crosses our line of sight, similar to a lighthouse.

In 2011, Magic discovered unexpected very energetic photons.

WHAT IS A PULSAR? Pulsars are essentially rotating, highly magnatised neutron stars. These stars are made of matter much more densely packed than normal and which give the entire star a density comparable to an atomic nucleus. The diameter of our sun would shrink to less than 18 miles if it was that dense. These neutron stars also have extremely strong magnetic fields which accelerate charged particles. These give off radiation in a cone shaped beam which sweep across the sky like the light from a lighthouse as the star rotates. When the beam sweeps over earth, it becomes visible as a pulsar, producing light that cycles every few seconds to just a few milliseconds. Their rotational period is so stable that some astronomers use it to calibrate instruments and have proposed using it to synchronise clocks. British astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to discover a pulsar in 1967 when she spotted a radio pulsar. Since then other types of pulsars that emit x-rays and gamma rays have also been spotted. Advertisement

'We performed deep observation of the Crab pulsar with Magic to understand this phenomenon, expecting to measure the maximum energy of the pulsating photons,' said Emma de Oña Wilhelmi from the Institute of Space Sciences.

Roberta Zanin from (ICCUB-IEEC, Barcelona) continues: 'The new observations extend this tail to much higher, above trillion electron volt (TeV) energies.

'That is, several times more energetic than the previous measurement, violating all the theory models believed to be at work in neutron stars.'

Where and how this TeV emission is created remains still unknown and difficult to reconcile with the standard theories, the researchers say.