Illustration of Pulsar

1967 Pulsar

The book of science

Tom Sharp

Jocelyn Bell Burnell astrophysics Illustration of Pulsar

Pulsar

Jocelyn Bell had to argue that the bit of scruff on her chart-recorder pages jokingly dubbed LGM-1 for “Little Green Men” was not just an anomaly but a new astronomical phenomenon.

Lighthouses

Lighthouses composed of neutron stars or white dwarves sweep the sky at high rates to send out pulses of electro- magnetic emissions.

Pulsating quasar

A pulsar pulsates but it isn’t a quasi-stellar object, since it’s a star, a star that in its explosive past spun off its lighter shell and collapsed to spin like crazy and from its highly magnetized core beam across the universe.

Portmanteaus

Theortars, fantasars, and other creatates of scientiction, backed by astronysics, mathetry, and poetience, help peoplists contemplure the excessivast imagiverse.

Until Jocelyn Bell Burnell found the second and third pulsars, she and her advisor considered the possibility that the first one was the result of an alien civilization trying to contact us.

See also in The book of science:

Readings in wikipedia: