Melbourne (PTI): Astronomers are puzzled by the discovery of a strange fast-spinning pulsar in an elongated orbit around an apparent Sun-like star, pushing scientists to figure out how this unique system was produced.

Pulsars are neutron stars whose strong magnetic fields channel lighthouse-like beams of light and radio waves that whirl around as the star spins. Located about 21,000 light years from Earth, the pulsar, a city-sized superdense stellar corpse left over after a massive star exploded as a supernova, is spinning on its axis 465 times every second. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.

"Our ideas about how the fastest-spinning pulsars are produced do not predict either the kind of orbit or the type of companion star this one has," said David Champion of the Australia Telescope National Facility. "We have to come up with some new scenarios to explain this weird pair," he added.

Astronomers first detected the pulsar, called J1903+0327, as part of a long-term survey using the National Science Foundation's Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, the ScienceDaily online said. "This is a fascinating object that has a lot to teach us about physics. It is going to be exciting to peel away the mystery of how this thing came to be," Champion was quoted as saying in the report.