All kidding aside, this is clickbait. A star cannot be teardrop shaped. They said oh it is weird and shaped like a teardrop all you stupid people who don’t know crap about astrophysics. Then they say oh it really is a binary star system with one of the two stars being a pulsar. The pulsar pulsates in all directions on its equatorial plane while the companion star eclipses it regularly as they orbit each other. The smaller star is probably a neutron star and is probably more massive because neutron stars are the pulsars and are smaller and more dense because they have more mass. That explains why the larger star can eclipse the smaller pulsar and the fuzzy image in the telescope looks like a teardrop because you can not focus at that distance.
Why it took 40 years to find one? Because they don’t last very long. That neutron star is going to consume the larger companion star probably in less than 10,000 years.
The article says the companion star is a red dwarf. But yes it’s probably a very short-lived scenario, if a few million years can be considered short-lived.