Air force had early warning of pulsars

Nature: It was one of the most important astronomical discoveries of the twentieth century, and it became one of the more controversial when only one of the discoverers received a Nobel prize. Now, 81-year-old Charles Schisler, who forty years ago was a US Air Force staff sergeant at a remote Alaskan radar outpost, has come forward to explain how he had used a military radar to identify around a dozen radio sources, some of which were pulsars, months before the science community officially discovered the astronomical objects.Astronomers who have seen Schisler’s meticulous logs believe that he spotted a bright pulsar in the nearby Crab Nebula months before the first scientific observation of a pulsar was published in Nature (A. Hewish et al. Nature 217, 709â713; 1968 ). Although Schisler never knew exactly what he was seeing, the story should be counted as an early pulsar spotting, says Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astronomer at the University of Oxford, UK, and one of the authors on the original paper. “He happened to be a very observant person,” Bell Burnell says.