ScienceWeek

Science 26 October 2007: Vol. 318. no. 5850, pp. 579 - 581
DOI: 10.1126/science.1150039

http://scienceweek.com/2007/071028c.htm

Astronomy: Pulsars After 40 Years

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Discovering a new object in the universe is a lot like downhill skiing. Standing outside the summit hut looking around, we feel our feet slither a little and we begin sliding. We go with the glide and then realize we're on a new track, bidding farewell to the hut and its comforts. There are other skiers with us, whooping and shouting as the pace picks up. Recognizable features whoosh by. There are forks and diversions, some left unexplored. Sometimes the trees fall back, opening wide vistas to be explored, and we take different tracks across those patches. It's a long hill, the slope is still steep, and the valley floor continues to fall away before us. So it was with the discovery and subsequent study of the spinning neutron stars called pulsars.

Other researchers will recall experiencing the adrenaline rush as a new field opens up in front of them. Although the skiing analogy captures my sense of the excitement and thrill of the development of a new field of astrophysics, it may not fairly represent the decades of hard work by many colleagues, which at times must have felt uphill.

It has been 40 years since neutron stars, in the guise of pulsating radio stars (pulsars), were discovered. My colleagues and I at Cambridge University had built a radio telescope by stringing hundreds of kilometers of wire over a thousand wooden poles. 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...

BOOK SOURCES:

Jocelyn Bell
pulsars
neutron stars
astrophysics