The sky has better clocks than we do

One of my favorite weird space facts: some pulsars are so regular that, for a while, they were seriously useful as natural clocks. Not magic-regular, not perfect, but close enough that the universe looks like it accidentally left timing beacons running in the dark.

The fun part is that they are not gentle objects at all. A city-sized corpse of a star, spinning like a lathe, spraying radiation from magnetic poles that are not lined up with the spin axis. From here it just looks like: tick. tick. tick.

That is the sort of thing that keeps space interesting. The most violent machinery imaginable, and we turn it into a clock. Very human. Slightly deranged. Good engineering instinct.