Jim Palfreyman was the first person to observed the glitch of the Vela pulsar – a dead star which emits small pulses of radiation as it rotates – in action, using a 26-metre telescope in Hobart that could capture the individual pulses.

Glitches occur approximately every three years when the pulsar speeds up for a short period of time.

Scientists did not know how quickly the pulsar sped up.

“If we know how quick the speed up occurs, that tells us information about the matter of the pulsar,” Mr Palfreyman said.

He will present a talk on his discovery at a Royal Society of Tasmania lecture.

His research was important because they were “looking at a laboratory that we cannot recreate here on Earth, the temperatures and pressures and magnetic field surrounding the pulsar are very large in every sense of the word”.

To put it in perspective, the Vela pulsar weighs one-and-a-half times the mass of the sun despite being only 20 kilometres across, Mr Palfreyman said.

“A cup full [of pulsar matter] would weigh as much as Mount Everest and it’s spinning 11 times a second.”

By studying pulsars, Mr Palfreyman said it helped people understand the nature of matter when exposed to extreme conditions.

Now it may be a while off before this research can be used, it could have an impact in the future.

For example, if people developed nuclear fusion power reactors to generate energy, which involved forcing atoms together to create more atoms, the research could help scientists understand what happened to matter under extreme conditions, he said.

His observations supported the scientific hypothesis that the core of the dead star was a superfluid, and surrounded by a hard crust.

They didn’t rotate at the same speeds and the crust would slow down over about three years before the swiftly spinning-core momentarily latched onto the surface, forcing it to move faster, he said.

“We’ve achieved a world first, something that pulsar astronomers have wanted to see done since pulsars were discovered back in 1968,” he said.

“We’ve managed to do it here, down in little old Tasmania, hanging off the end of the Earth with a moderate sized radio telescope, with a small budget, we’ve managed to pull off a really great and interesting discovery.”

“We can do seriously world class research here in Tasmania.”

It was a groundbreaking discovery, he said.

For people who shied away from the subject, he said science helped humanity live a better life.

“Science is a process, it’s not a body of knowledge. It’s an actual process for finding out things in the real world.”

He encouraged budding scientists of any age to work on their mathematics because it would help them pursue a scientific career, Mr Palfreyman said.

He has a degree in Mathematics as well as a Masters in Astrophysics.