The Discovery of Pulsars

The journey to discovering pulsars began in 1967 with Jocelyn Bell-Burnell's meticulous work analyzing signals from a newly constructed radio telescope. Despite battling a challenging environment as a woman in a male-dominated field, she found an unusual repeating signal that did not resemble typical radio interference or celestial objects like quasars. Her diligence led to confirmatory tests that revealed this signal was not a fluke, but rather a consistent pattern, prompting speculation about extraterrestrial intelligence. Ultimately, this signal was identified as a pulsar, a type of rapidly spinning neutron star emitting regular bursts of radio waves.