Astronomers have caught a white dwarf, the kind of stellar remnant our Sun will become, in a rarely seen stage of its afterlife. The dead star orbits a neutron star that spins hundreds of times a second, sweeping twin beams of radiation like a cosmic lighthouse.

The binary system, designated NGC 362D, was found with the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. The white dwarf companion was spotted in archival Hubble Space Telescope data collected between 2006 and 2016, which also revealed the system’s history.

The white dwarf is the youngest ever seen partnered with a millisecond pulsar. It stopped donating stellar material to the neutron star about 600 million years ago, yet emits less ultraviolet light than expected. Researchers say an envelope of ejected material is likely blocking the signal.

“What makes this system particularly interesting is the possibility of observing it at a very early stage of its evolution,” said team leader Greta Ettorre of the University of Bologna in a statement to Space.com.