Discovery of Pulsar in 1967

The story of the study of pulsars begins in 1054 AD when Chinese astronomers observed the appearance of a bright object in the sky, the Crab supernova.

Pulsars are rotating neutron stars that provide unique information about their interiors, about the relativistic plasma physics of their magnetospheres and about their interviewing media through which pulses emitted by these objects must propagate.

The discovery was made by Jocelyn Bell within a month of the start of regular recordings in July 1967. She discovered the first pulsar while working as a British graduate student in Cambridge. She using a radio array telescope designed to find compact radio sources that displayed interplanetary scintillation.

Large fluctuations of signal were seen at about the same time on successive days. Unlike other radio signals from celestial bodies, this was a series of regular pulses. At first Bell and the leader of the project, Anthony Hewish, thought the signal was interference but they found it day after in the same place in the sky.

The pulsing radio source Bell had observed with her radio telescope was the first known pulsar. However the discovery had not been announced until February 1968. In the following 15 years considerable effort was put understanding various aspects of this remarkable new phenomenon, among them the birth, evolution and demise of rotating, strongly magnetized neutron star as sources of broad band radio noise.

The first confirmed discovery of pulsar planets followed a long period of speculation and spurious claims, including one by Matthew Bailes, Andrew Lyne and colleagues in Nature in 1991.
Discovery of Pulsar in 1967