Pulsar

Pulsars flash because dead stars sweep beams across the universe.

A pulsar is not actually blinking on and off like a lamp.

It sends out beams of radiation from regions linked to its magnetic poles.

The central star is a dense fading ember, and the surviving material bears the scars of upheaval.

Planetary systems can outlive their sons, but not unchanged.

Pulsar planets orbit dead stars that beam radiation through space.

The first confirmed planets beyond our solar system were not found around a normal star.

They were discovered around a pulsar.

And then we got a Devon Witherspoon silver refractor as well.

And then, as I mentioned before, I ripped some packs with Scott Waldron, and I picked up from my Prism Mega... a green Pulsar, grey Zabel rookie card.

I'm chuffed with that, MC.

Very nice.

planets with temperatures of thousands of Kelvin.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, we now understand that both Hot Jupiters and Pulsar planets are in fact very unusual, rare types of planets.

For example, although most stars indeed have planets of one kind or another, less than 1% of them have Hot Jupiter type planets.

Now, you might be wondering, if they are so rare, then how come they dominated this early phase of exoplanet detection back in the 90s? Well, the reason is simple.

Why? Because they are so damn bright that we could see them from essentially the other side of the universe.

So the history of astronomy teaches us that often the easiest examples of astronomical phenomena to detect are in fact highly atypical.

Pulsar planets, hot Jupiters, giant stars and supernovae are all freaks, extreme examples of their broader class.

They are the loud, obnoxious twits at the cocktail party that suck up all the oxygen.

I just thought this was the next logical step in my brilliant career and probably didn't stop and think about, oh, what if this is wrong? What...

I found out about six months later was that although what added to these wonderful graphical interfaces to things, there were actually some auxiliary files which stored the coordinates of the Pulsar.

And instead of a unified system where the thing that transformed the coordinates to the barocenter and the thing that fit for the planetary parameters sharing the same file, they're actually different files.

And although Settner had done everything right, he didn't know that there was this kind of other file which you had to update in an iterative procedure with the coordinates.

Yeah, very...

Very devastating, actually.

But I think we published the paper and then we intensified how often we observed the planet, Pulsar.

And it had a prediction of where, how it should behave.

In 2007, astronomer Duncan Lorimer was reviewing archival data from the Parkes Radio Telescope, the same instrument that would later detect BLC-1.

The data had been recorded in 2001, six years earlier, as part of a Pulsar survey.

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit beams of radio energy, and pulsar surveys record vast quantities of radio data in the hope of finding new ones.

Lorimer was not looking for anything unusual.

He was a pulsar astronomer, doing pulsar work, combing through old data.

And I brought a couple of cars with me.

We were fluffing around with Pulsars, the Apra series.

We were very strong in that.

And it just kind of, we just arrived.