PSR J1022+1001 is a pulsar as indicated by the letters PSR in the object's name. The letter J and the digits in the object's name give its coordinates. The pulsar sits in the constellation leo at a distance of about 2770 light years (850 pc) from Earth [1], which is kind of close but not really close, at least in terms of pulsars.
What makes this pulsar interesting is that it is a millisecond pulsar. This class of pulsars rotates really fast. Well, most pulsars rotate very quickly already, so I guess you could say that any pulsar rotates really fast, but PSR J1022+1001 is rotating even faster than many other pulsars. As a brief review, which will be helpful for understanding what makes PSR J1022+1001 special, a pulsar is a rotating version of a neutron star, which is the really compressed ball of matter left over from when a star multiple times the size of the Sun explodes as a supernova. The gravitational forces in these stars will compress all of the electrons and protons in the core's atoms into neutrons, so the core could be described as a single giant ball of neutrons. Pulsars and other neutron stars are typically 10-20 kilometers in diameter and have masses between 1 and 3 times the mass of the Sun. Because of the conservation of angular momentum, when a very large star starting with a little bit of rotation then dies, the compressed leftover core will end up rotating really fast. Most typical pulsars rotate once every second, which is already really impressive for something that is 10 to 20 km across that weighs a couple times the mass of the Sun.
However, PSR J1022+1001 rotates once every 16.5 milliseconds, or alternately, 60.6 times every second [2]. This is so insanely rapid that it does not fit into the scenario where the pulsar just retains the angular momentum of the star that it formed out of. Instead, the current hypothesis is that millisecond pulsars like PSR J1022+1001 must have been in binary star systems at some point and must have gravitationally stripped away the gas from the outer layers of the companion stars that they were orbiting. This could have happened when, for example, the cores of the companion stars filled up with helium and they expanded to become red giants. The gas falling onto the pulsars would have given the pulsars a push in terms of rotation, and they would have sped up to ludicrous rotational speeds, at which point I recommend watching Spaceballs to understand how extreme this is. Anyway, PSR J1022+1001 has been found to be in a binary star system with a white dwarf with a mass of around 0.9 times the mass of the Sun that is in all certainty the leftover core from the red giant star that sped up the pulsar [2].
Pulsars do eventually slow down by, in a strange way, radiating their rotational energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation, but they can keep spinning for thousands of years. Even accounting for this slight deceleration, millisecond pulsars in particular produce very steady pulses of radiowave emission. Notably, PSR J1022+1001 is one of 25 pulsars that have been used by the European Pulsar Timing Array to search for gravitational waves [3]. These waves, which would be created by things like when black holes merge together, are effectively slight distortions in space itself, and they would cause slight variations in the timing of the observed radio pulses from PSR J1022+1001 and other millisecond pulsars. The group has already most likely detected at least one gravitational wave already [3], but it should be interesting to see what comes out of these gravitational wave searches in the future.