A pulsar is a rapidly spinning and extraordinarily dense object created when a massive star explodes as a supernova. Pulsars, a rare type of neutron star, have very strong magnetic fields that channel beams of light and radio waves out like a lighthouse as the star spins.

Scientists say that all of the pulsars discovered so far have shared the same type of orbit. Pulsars have so far only been found orbiting in a perfectly circular orbit around a white dwarf star. Due to the fact that all known pulsars share the same type of orbit, scientist are baffled by a recently discovered pulsar called J1903+0327 located around 21,000 light years from Earth.

What has astronomers so confused about the new pulsar is that it has a highly elongated orbit around a star very similar to our sun. David Champion, an astronomer with the Australia Telescope National Facility, said in a statement, “What we have found is a millisecond pulsar that is in the wrong kind of orbit around what appears to be the wrong kind of star. Now we have to figure out how this strange system was produced.”

A millisecond pulsar gets its name from the fact that it spins on its axis around 465 times per second. Typical pulsars rotate around 10-20 times per second by comparison. The new millisecond pulsar was discovered using a radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

Scott Ransom from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory told Reuters in a telephone interview, “The big question is -- how in the heck did this thing form, because it doesn't follow our standard models of how these things form. If you were to ask any astronomer if we would have found a system like this, they would have said no. So this is a very big surprise.”

Scientists currently know of about 100 pulsars in binary star systems. Speculation from the scientists is that a third star -- possibly a neutron star or white dwarf -- may be orbiting with the other two stars. If a third star is part of the bizarre pulsar formation this would be the first pulsar in a three star system.