Lecture 19 - PULSARS
In 1967, a young PhD student Jocelyn Bell discovered an object that `twinkled' in the radio wavelenth. This `twinkling', appearing like a regular train of radio pulses, would later be identified with the beamed radiation from a neutron star. A decade later, an artist used a `stacked plot' image of a large number of successive such radio pulses as a record label and it ended up being an iconic image in popular culture.
Originally though, the image was created by Harold Craft for his PhD thesis at the Arecibo Observatory, using data from the very pulsar Jocelyn Bell discovered.
Twinkle twinkle little star. In August 1967, Jocelyn Bell, a young student in Cambridge University discovered something that twinkled at radio wavelength. It turned out to be a really ‘little star’! It soon emerged that she had made one of the greatest discoveries in astronomy; she had discovered a neutron star. Since then, nearly three thousand neutron stars have been discovered. In this lecture, I shall explain how a neutron star produces electromagnetic radiation and why it ‘pulses’.