Astrophile: Stopped clocks deepen pulsar enigmas

Some pulsars go dark, though, and Camilo’s was not the first. In the 1970s, some regular pulsars were spotted switching off for a few seconds to a few minutes, a phenomenon known as “nulling”. And in the past decade, a new class of pulsars has been found , in which the silences can range from minutes to a few hours. They were dubbed rotating radio transients, or RRATs. Around the same time, a pulsar was found that pulsed for about a week and then switched off for about a month before repeating the cycle.

There are papers discussing the possibility that precession could cause this, i.e. the pulsar is still “on” but not pointing at us during the nulling interval, but I didn’t see that brought up in the article.