This summer NASA launched its first-ever mission to gaze deep into the mysterious, rhythmically flickering entities called pulsars. 

The Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer mission, or NICER, started measuring pulsars – short for pulsating stars – from its perch aboard the International Space Station in July, 50 years after a young astronomer accidently discovered these unusual stellar objects.

We stand to learn much more as NICER trains its sensitive instruments on these neutron stars, studying their strong gravity, ultra-dense matter and the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe.

Here are five things you should know about pulsars now:

1. A woman discovered pulsars

Scientists had theorized that they existed, but it was astronomer Jocelyn Bell who first observed and analyzed one in 1967 while using a vast radio telescope in Cambridge, England to study quasars. Her hundreds of feet of paper data picked up on an unexpected pattern of regularly pulsing light – flashes that repeated ever 1.33730 seconds. The pulses were so regular the scientists at first did not believe they were looking at a natural phenomenon.

2. No two pulsars are alike

They began their lives as huge stars – up to 20 times the mass of our sun. When these stars ran out of fuel, they collapsed to form incredibly dense spheres called neutron stars. How dense? Just one teaspoon of their matter would weigh a billion tons here on earth. Neutron stars rotate at different velocities, some just once every few hours, others hundreds of times per second.

As they spin, some of them emit jets of particles from their magnetic poles, emitting powerful streams of electromagnetic radiation. As the sphere rotates, the beams sweep like the lamp of a lighthouse, and the star carcass appears to blink or pulse at us here on Earth.

Watch a the birth of a pulsar:

3. The big question: What’s inside a pulsar?

It’s one of the many long-standing questions astrophysicists have about these super dense, spinning, powerfully magnetic objects. Pulsars contain a bunch of neutrons, protons, electrons and possibly quarks, but they exist in conditions of extreme pressure and density. So it’s anybody’s guess – well, any nuclear physicist’s guess – how these familiar particles behave and interact in the heart of a pulsar. New, precise measurement of the sizes and masses of pulsars will help pin down theories.

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4. Scientists have identified more than 2,000 pulsars

The best known to us is the Crab Nebula, right here in our galaxy, just 6,500 light years away. It formed in a supernova explosion, which crushed the parent star’s core into a neutron star. The resulting pulsar is nestled inside a nebula and is among the most well-studied objects in our cosmos.

5. Pulsars could be the GPS of the galaxy

The NICER mission will include tests to validate the use of pulsars as a sort of galactic GPS. Embedded equipment will use NICER’s X-ray observations of pulsar signals to determine NICER’s exact position in orbit.

“You can time the pulsations of pulsars distributed in many directions around a spacecraft to figure out where the vehicle is and navigate it anywhere,” said Zaven Arzoumanian, science lead for the NICER mission. “That’s exactly how the GPS system on Earth works, with precise clocks flown on satellites in orbit.”

Using these extreme beacons could eventually revolutionize navigation into the deepest parts of space.

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