‘Two by Two’

Abstract

In the early 1970s, Dick Manchester was in the United States sharing an office with Joe Taylor at the University of Massachusetts. It was the beginning of a long professional relationship that survives to this day. While they collaborated on many projects, there was one that Taylor initiated that Manchester didn’t take part in. Taylor proposed to use the largest radio telescope in the world, the Arecibo radio telescope on the island of Puerto Rico, which borders the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. In order to gain time on any professional astronomical instrument, astronomers need to submit a proposal outlining what they hope to achieve, hopefully justifying in the eyes of the telescope’s managers¹ why valuable telescope time should be given to the astronomer submitting the proposal. The goal of Taylor’s project was much the same as other pioneering pulsar surveys: push the limits of sensitivity and build up a statistical sample of pulsars in the Galaxy that would help astronomers understand them.