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96 Feet of Chart a Day Hid the First Pulsar #Shorts
Ninety-six feet of chart paper a day: that is what a new radio telescope near Cambridge produced in 1967, and one research student, Jocelyn Bell, read it all by hand.
Weeks into the survey, a mark appeared that was neither a twinkling radio source nor interference, and kept returning to the same patch of sky. Faster recordings showed only noise for weeks, until at the end of November 1967 the fast recorder caught separate pulses 1 1/3 seconds apart, keeping time with the stars. The team had chosen to read the charts by eye because a person spots an unfamiliar signal more easily than a program (Bell Burnell, 1977; Hewish, Nobel lecture, 1974).
The two main first-hand accounts, Bell's and supervisor Antony Hewish's, disagree on some dates and schedules, and both were written years later.
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#Shorts #science #pulsars #radioastronomy #fyp #foryou #viral
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