
Artist's illustration of a pulsar
Imagine an object with the mass of the Sun, crushed down to the size of Manhattan. Now set that object spinning hundreds of times a second, blasting out powerful beams of radiation like a lighthouse. That's a pulsar, one of the most exotic objects in the Universe.
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Coming Soon!
Another great episode. Pulsers are really incredible.
I've always thought it was pretty obnoxious that Jocelyn Bell Burnell didn't get acknowledged for her participation in the discovery of pulsars. It's kind of like Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of the structure of DNA—hugely important discovery, and the woman scientist gets left out. Ugh. At least we've started to level the playing field, but the Nobel committee tend to ignore women, especially if they were graduate students or postdocs under an advisor. As a professor, I find that fairly nauseating…