NASA's Nuclear Spectroscope Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has identified a candidate pulsar in Andromeda -- the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way. This likely pulsar is brighter at high energies than the Andromeda galaxy's entire black hole population.

The inset image shows the pulsar candidate in blue, as seen in X-ray light by NuSTAR. The background image of Andromeda was taken by NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer in ultraviolet light.

Andromeda is a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way but larger in size. It lies 2.5 million light-years away in the Andromeda constellation.

A variation of this image can be found in PIA20061.

NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech in Pasadena and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Virginia. Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University, New York; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California; ATK Aerospace Systems, Goleta, California, and with support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Science Data Center.NuSTAR's mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, with the ASI providing its equatorial ground station located at Malindi, Kenya. The mission's outreach program is based at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California. NASA's Explorer Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.

For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/nustar and http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/.