Pulsars 40 Years On

Science : It has been 40 years since neutron stars, in the guise of pulsating radio stars (pulsars), were discovered (2). My colleagues and I at Cambridge University had built a radio telescope by stringing hundreds of kilometers of wire over a thousand wooden poles says Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Our goal was to detect quasars (quasistellar sources) that had been recognized as the most distant detectable objects in the universe and also extremely powerful sources of radio waves. Several months into the data collection, I noticed a series of regular radio pulses in the midst of a lot of receiver noise. After initial anxieties that there was radio interference or a fault with the equipment, it became clear that we were dealing with neutron stars, which are small in radius but large in mass (and therefore also large in density). The significance of the discovery dawned gradually and, indeed, is still developing.