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The past, present and future of pulsars

Nature Astronomy volume 1, pages 831–834 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

On the 50th anniversary of the accidental discovery of pulsars (pulsating radio stars, also known as neutron stars) I reflect on the process of their detection and how our understanding of these stars gradually grew. Fifty years on, we have a much better (but still incomplete) understanding of these extreme objects, which I summarize here. The study of pulsars is advancing several areas of fundamental physics, including general relativity, particle physics, condensed-matter physics, and radiation processes in extreme electric and magnetic fields. New observational facilities coming online in the radio regime (such as the Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope and the Square Kilometre Array precursors) will revolutionize the search for pulsars by accessing thousands more, thus ushering in a new era of discovery for the field.

I attribute the discovery of the first pulsar to imposter syndrome. Yes, we did have a very large radio telescope (it covered an area of 4 acres, or 57 tennis courts); yes, we were working in a new area of phase-space, surveying the sky with a much shorter time constant than had previously been used, but that first signal occupied only a few millimetres in some 100 m of chart paper, and yet I registered its existence.

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Fig. 1

Graham Woan.

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Fig. 3

SKA South Africa.

Fig. 4

Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker, Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.

Fig. 5

NAOC.

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  1. Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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  1. Jocelyn Bell Burnell
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Correspondence to Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

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Bell Burnell, J. The past, present and future of pulsars. Nat Astron 1, 831–834 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-0323-x

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