It is not immediately obvious that these repeaters have anything to do with pulsars.
Such glitches have been observed in other pulsars before, but their cause is unknown.
X-ray pulsars rotate at the relatively sedate pace of once or twice a second, or slower.
The researchers hope that the system will uncover more "hiccuping" pulsars to help elucidate how they work.
Yet these anomalies are among the youngest pulsars known, in some cases mere babes a few thousand years old.
The newly discovered one rotates 401 times a second as fast as millisecond pulsars.
Perhaps, it was hypothesised, the absent pulsars might have been kicked away from their parental nebulae during the initial explosion.
His work helped track some of the earliest spacecraft and was instrumental in confirming the first discovered pulsars and quasars.
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Pulsars are often ejected from a supernova at high velocity, meaning, in effect, that they have had a huge sideways kick.
Starting with such a high speed of rotation, these pulsars continue to emit signals for billions of years before fading out.
Dr Gold was also on the money with his explanation of pulsars.
The first is that not all supernova remnants (which are often visible as glowing nebulae, such as the Crab nebula) have pulsars inside them.
The captured positrons might also have been produced inside stars called pulsars, Ting said, though so far the evidence points to dark matter explosions.
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It was that pulsars are rotating neutron stars, the super-dense last stage of collapse of a star not quite heavy enough to form a black hole.
Pulsars are a special type of neutron star that rotates rapidly, emitting a beam of high-energy that spins much like the bulb in a lighthouse.
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The excess of positrons could be caused by a number of cosmic phenomenon, including pulsars, but researchers are hopeful that further testing will narrow down the possibilities.
By then, the outer layers of its companion star have been completely torn away and the accretion disc has vanished: millisecond pulsars do not have accretion discs.
RadioAstron will also examine pulsars and the outer regions of spiral galaxies in order to get more precise measurements on their rate of rotation and distance from earth.
All that needs be supposed, therefore, is that a significant fraction of pulsars are endowed at birth with hugely powerful magnetic fields and all three puzzles become less puzzling.
Although the discovery was published only this week, many astronomers have heard the result and now consider that the life story of the pulsars has been clearly established.
One idea is that "star quakes" on the surfaces of pulsars affect the change in rotation speed, or that the glitch is caused by interactions between the stars' fluid interiors and crusts.
Jodrell Bank, which remains part of Manchester University, spends much of its time looking for quasars and pulsars, large stars that have collapsed in on themselves and become hugely dense rotating neutron stars.
This would be like a pulsar, but with a magnetic field a quadrillion times stronger than the sun's, and about a thousand times stronger than the already massive fields that are inferred for ordinary pulsars.
Indeed, the conference heard of still more supernova remnants that had been declared free of detectable radio pulsars and also of a few previous associations between remnants and pulsars that have turned out to be false.
If the equivalent of an earthquake were to occur on one (and they are known to occur on pulsars), it would be powerful enough to erupt with a blast of gamma rays thereby solving puzzle number three, the soft gamma-ray repeaters.
Fermi has been a tremendous success at examining some of the most high-energy processes in the cosmos, publishing a catalogue filled with details of the spinning neutron stars known as pulsars, and a wide array of "active galactic nuclei" - probably supermassive black holes.
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