It was discovered in 2003 at Australia's Parkes Observatory by an international team led by the Italian radio astronomer Marta Burgay during a high-latitude pulsar survey.

These extremely dense objects rotate on their axes, producing focused electromagnetic waves which sweep around the sky and briefly point toward Earth in a lighthouse effect at rates that can reach a few hundred pulses per second.

The system was originally observed by an international team during a high-latitude multibeam survey organized in order to discover more pulsars in the night sky.

As a result of energy loss due to gravitational waves, the common orbit (roughly 800,000 kilometers [500,000 miles] in diameter) shrinks by 7 mm per day.

[6] Observations of 16 years of timing data have been reported in 2021 to be on agreement with general relativity by studying the loss of orbital energy due to gravitational waves.

A pulsar–black hole system could be an even stronger test of Einstein's theory of general relativity, due to the immense gravitational forces exerted by both celestial objects.

The Square Kilometre Array, a radio telescope due to be completed in the late 2020s, will both further observe known and detect new binary pulsar systems in order to test general relativity.