Abstract
Pulsars were discovered at Cambridge in 1968 by Jocelyn Bell, Anthony Hewish and their collaborators (Hewish et al. 1968) and provided the first observational evidence of the existence of neutron stars, a form of collapsed star first discussed by Baade and Zwicky (1934). They seem to possess extremely strong magnetic fields, among the strongest anywhere in the Universe, and hence provide a unique opportunity for the study of a number of unusual electrodynamic processes. As the end-point of stellar evolution for at least some massive stars, their observation provides significant constraints on theories of this evolution. The impulsive and highly linearly polarized nature of the radiation makes them extremely useful probes of the interstellar medium, revealing information upon the distribution of free electron densities, free electron turbulence and interstellar magnetic fields through the Galaxy. They have also yielded information on General Relativity and given the first observational evidence for the existence of gravitational radiation.
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Lyne, A.G. (1987). Observations of Pulsars. In: Pacini, F. (eds) High Energy Phenomena Around Collapsed Stars. NATO ASI Series, vol 195. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3823-6_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3823-6_6
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