Zombie Watch: Zombie star spins like crazy.

Shoot it in the head!! From Space.com:

The fading glow of a "zombie" star reveals that its body remains plenty active, as seen in an incredible rotation rate.

The very old star has a dead heart, having exhausted all the fuel that runs thermonuclear fusion. But the star itself goes on spinning about its axis once every 2.6 seconds and generating intense magnetic fields.

The term zombie was applied by researchers associated with the work, in a statement today. The more scientific term is Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters (SGRs). There are only five known, four in the Milky Way Galaxy and one in a nearby satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Each of these strange beasts is between roughly 6 and 20 miles in diameter (10 to 30 km), yet contains about twice the mass of the sun. They're part of a larger class of dead, collapsed stars known as neutron stars.