Jocelyn Bell Burnell

And we discovered them...

Um, well, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered them in 1967 by seeing them for the first time in radio waves, uh, as pulsating radio object.

And so, um, next year is gonna be 50 years since we have discovered them, and we don't know how they emit radio waves.

[laughs] Yeah.

The textbook is updated, move on, but the actual history of astrophysics tells a very different story.

Pulsars were detected in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and initially labelled LGM1 for Little Green Men.

because no natural explanation seemed adequate at the time.

The identification of pulsars as rotating neutron stars followed within months, which seems rapid until you consider that neutron stars had been theorized in 1934, more than three decades before their signals were detected.

We have to look for their gravitational influence on the objects around them.

In 1967, Joshua and Bell Burnell discovered pulsars rapidly rotating neutron stars emitting radio waves, which proved that stars could collapse into incredibly dense, bizarre states.

Then astronomers found a system called Cygnus X-1.

It is a massive visible star that is violently whipping around an invisible heavy companion.