A pulsar, one of deep space’s spinning “lighthouses”, has faded from view because a warp in space-time tilted its beams away from Earth.

The tiny, heavy pulsar is locked in a fiercely tight orbit with another star.

The gravity between them is so extreme that it is thought to emit waves and to bend space - making the pulsar wobble.

By tracking its motion closely for five years, astronomers determined the pulsar’s weight and also quantified the gravitational disturbance.

Then, the pulsar vanished. Its wheeling beams of radio waves now pass us by, and the researchers have calculated that this can be explained by “precession”: the dying star wobbling into the dip in space-time that its own orbit created.