Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
In July 1967, just after her twenty-fourth birthday, the Northern Irish astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell noticed a strange signal in the data streaming in from the radio telescope she was monitoring. She had discovered a pulsar — an epoch-making breakthrough that earned the Nobel Prize, though Bell was denied recognition for the discovery she herself had made.
Pulsars furnished watershed evidence that neutron stars — the collapsed cores left behind by the final explosion of dying stars, first theorized more than three decades earlier — were real. From this followed the even more thrilling indication that black holes — which even Einstein had regarded…
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