An international team of scientists observed a never-before-seen space event using NASA's Swift and Chandra X-Ray Observatory telescopes, according to a news release.

The team discovered a pulsar - a highly magnetized rotating neutron star emitting electromagnetic radiation - with two identities. The star was freely switching back in forth in its style of pulsed emissions, one in X-ray and one in radio.

The scientists believe it is a rise and fall of gas streaming into the pulsar from a companion star that triggers the switches.

"This transitional object took us decades to find, and it provides us with a unique opportunity to observe a pulsar's intense magnetic field in action," said study co-author Sergio Campana, an astronomer at Brera Observatory in Merate, Italy.

The paper was published Thursday in the journal Nature.

Because black holes cannot be observed directly, neutron stars are the closest thing to them astronomers can study. They are capable of super-massive compression and can crumble up half the Earth's mass into a ball the size of Manhattan.

Millisecond pulsars, like the one the scientists observed, combine this incredible compression with top-flight speeds. The fastest neutron star known orbits at a speed of 43,000 rotations per minute.

The neutron stars reside among normal stars and, during their spatial lifetime, they receive a flow of gas from other stars. The neutron star uses the gas to heat to millions of degrees and to emit X-ray pulses. This gas flow, however, stops after about a billion years. The neutron star still uses its ultra-fast spin and magnetic field to create together radio emissions.

"Swift provided the first accurate, subarcminute localization of the X-ray burst, which allowed for the additional discovery of the pulsar's radio waves by the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA)," said Jamie Kennea, a Swift team member at Penn State.

Chandra pinpointed the X-ray source but could not pick up the signals of radio emissions. Astronomers using various radio telescope observatories in Australia, the Netherlands and West Virginia were able to accurately locate the radio emissions of the pulsar.

"At high mass flow rates, the gas squeezes the magnetic field and is able to reach the surface to produce X-ray emission," said Alesasandro Papitto, leader of Barcelona, Spain observation team. "At the same time, the dense cloud of ionized gas surrounding the pulsar quenches the radio signals, effectively blocking them from our view."