Pulsars discovered
Pulsars discovered
Overview
In 1967 Cambridge graduate student Jocelyn Bell Burnell noticed a string of 'scruff' on chart-recorder paper — radio pulses repeating every 1.33 seconds from a point fixed in the sky. The sources, briefly dubbed LGM for 'little green men', were identified as rapidly spinning neutron stars: lighthouses of matter compressed to nuclear density. Pulsars became precision laboratories for relativity and dense matter, and the 1974 Nobel Prize for the discovery went to her supervisor, Antony Hewish.