Astronomers mystified by `weird` star

Astronomers are puzzled by the discovery of a pulsar with an unusual orbit never before seen in similar fast-spinning neutron stars that beam regular pulses of radio waves.

Pulsars usually have a circular orbit around white dwarf stars, but the newly found object travels in an oval, or "eccentric," motion around a sun-like star, according to a study posted Friday in the online journal Science Express.

"Pulsars like this are why you do these surveys," David Champion, one of the study's co-authors and an astronomer working at the Australia Telescope National Facility, was quoteds by AFP as saying in a news release.

"You don't want to just find hundreds of objects, you want to find the two or three that are plain weird and we've found one," he said.