THE DISCOVERY OF PULSARS

HEWISH, A. ET AL.

Observation of a Rapidly Pulsating Radio Source.

London, Macmillian and Co, 1968. Royal8vo. Bound in contemporary full cloth with title to spine. In "Nature", Vol. 217, 1968. Library stamp to upper right corner of title page, otherwise a fine and clean copy. Pp. 709-13. [Entier volume: XL, 1298 pp.].

First printing of the discovery of pulsars. Hewish was in 1974 awarded the Nobel Prize in physics "for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars".

"Their discovery, reported in 1968, came as a complete surprise, and astonishingly their radio signals behave like the ticks of a super-accurate clock. The unique characteristics of pulsars have since been used to explore the behaviour of gravity, the nature of nuclear matter, the late evolutionary stages of massive stars, and the character of the interstellar medium". (A Century of Nature).

"Antony Hewish had played a central role in the development of aperture synthesis and in 1964 began the study of the twinkling, or scintillation, of radio sources due to irregularities in the outflow of material from the Sun, what is known as the solar wind. A remarkable by-product of these studies was the discovery of pulsating radio sources, subsequently called pulsars, by Hewish and his graduate student, Jocelyn Bell. These objects were soon convincingly identified as rapidly rotating, magnetized neutrons stars, which had been predicted to exist on theoretical grounds. Their serendipitous discovery at long radio wavelengths was a crucial event for all astronomy." (DSB).

Order-nr.: 46965