A Lancaster college student has made a rare scientific discovery that is literally out of this world.
Franklin and Marshall College junior Jack Madden spent much of last summer combing through reams of data, searching for pulsars, which are rapidly rotating stars, and he found one.
The extra-galactic pulsar is outside the Milky Way galaxy, 160,000 light years from earth.
It's a rare find for any scientist. Only 1 percent of the 2,000 known pulsars are outside our galaxy.
"It was pretty exciting. It was very relieving to have finally found something after looking through so many candidates. It's been a really great experience," Madden said.
"In science, you never know what you're going to find, so you have to go through a lot of occasionally tedious work to find the real jewels that you're looking for," Franklin and Marshall College professor Fronefield Crawford said.
Madden is an astrophysics major.
He estimates he searched through 50,000 potential pulsar candidates this summer, using data from a large Australian telescope.
Pulsars are considered important to astronomers because they allow scientists to study physics in extreme conditions.