A "stellar corpse" in the Milky Way's twin galaxy has been discovered munching on a neighbouring star.
Andromeda - some 2.5 million light-years from Earth - is sometimes visible to the naked eye, and has a similar structure to our own spiral galaxy.
Decades of examining Andromeda have paid off after a spinning neutron star was spotted by the European Space Agency.
Neutron stars are remains of once-massive stars that died, and can often spin extremely rapidly.
They cannibalise their neighbouring stars, causing them to spin faster and give off pulses of high-energy X-rays.
They are quite common in the Milky Way, but until now have not been observed in Andromeda.
A search of XMM-Newton X-ray telescope data has uncovered evidence which fits the bill of a fast-spinning neutron star.
The star appears to spin every 1.2 seconds, feeding on a nearby star that orbits it every 1.3 days.
The findings were described in a new report. Co-author Gian Luca Israel said: "We looked through archival data of Andromeda spanning 2000-13, but it wasn’t until 2015 that we were finally able to identify this object in the galaxy's outer spiral."
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