A faint hum of gravitational waves rippling across the cosmos is now telling scientists what no telescope could show them: the dense, hidden structures buried at the centers of galaxies. A team of ...

Like cosmic lighthouses sweeping the universe with bursts of energy, pulsars have fascinated and baffled astronomers since they were first discovered 50 years ago. In two studies, international teams ...

Neutron stars are so named because in the simplest of models they are made of neutrons. They form when the core of a large star collapses, and the weight of gravity causes atoms to collapse. Electrons ...

Pulsar array artist’s impression of how NANOGrav observes pulsars in an effort detect gravitational waves. (Courtesy: NANOGrav/T Klein) The observation of tiny deviations in the arrival times of radio ...

On February 24, 1968, an astronomy grad student Jocelyn Bell announced that she had discovered the first pulsar. A few months earlier, she noticed what she called a "bit of scruff" in the data from ...

The article recounts Jocelyn Bell Burnell's 1967 discovery of highly regular radio signals, initially termed "scruff" and briefly "LGM-1," which led to the identification of pulsars as rapidly ...

In the Crab Nebula, a rapidly rotating neutron star, or pulsar (white dot near the center), powers the dramatic activity seen by Chandra. The inner X-ray ring is thought to be a shock wave that marks ...

A little bit of “scruff” in scientific data 50 years ago led to the discovery of pulsars — rapidly spinning dense stellar corpses that appear to pulse at Earth. Astronomer Jocelyn Bell made the chance ...

This visualization shows 294 gamma-ray pulsars, first plotted on an image of the entire starry sky as seen from Earth and then transitioning to a view from above our galaxy. The symbols show different ...

Researchers have apparently found a "missing link" between two types of pulsars. Pulsars are fast-spinning neutron stars, the superdense, collapsed cores left over from the explosive deaths of massive ...

Here’s a bit of science history that genuinely surprised many of us here at Ars Technica. We all know the famous story of how Jocelyn Bell-Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967 as a graduate student at ...