It was discovered in 2007 with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in a drift-scan survey.

The notable feature of this binary pulsar is its combination of high neutron-star mass and short orbital period: 2 hours and 27 minutes.

The first radio pulsar was discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell and her adviser, Antony Hewish using the Interplanetary Scintillation Array.

[5][6] The radiation emitted by pulsars is caused by interaction of the plasma surrounding the neutron star with its rapidly rotating magnetic field.

An international team of astronomers was nevertheless able to record the data from the antenna, letting the Earth do the job of moving the beam of the telescope across the sky, a process known as a drift scan survey.

[2] In 2011 the white dwarf companion to the pulsar was observed with the FORS2 spectrograph of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, in Chile.