January 6, 2009--NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered 12 new pulsars and is giving scientists a better view of the energy coming from these stellar remains.

Pulsars, like the one seen above in an animation still, are rapidly spinning neutron stars, the dense cores left behind when massive stars explode.

Astronomers found the first pulsars when beams of radio waves emanating from the objects' poles swept past Earth's line of sight, making the stars seem to pulse. But radio waves are fairly low energy, and they represent only a fragment of the star's intensity.

Fermi can detect high-energy gamma rays, which make up 10 percent or more of a pulsar's power.

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