Pulsating Stars: A NATURE Reprint

THE discovery of the pulsating radio stars by Miss Jocelyn Bell, working with Dr Hewish at Cambridge, rivals the early classic discoveries of extraterrestrial radio sources in its importance and in its excitement. It may at first have seemed to be a lucky accident that the pulsars, as they are now called, should be detected first in an experiment designed to investigate the solar wind; the fact that for several months after the publica- tion of the discovery no other pulsars had been detected in any other radio observatory shows that the discovery followed naturally on the many years of work that Hewish has put into the study of another type of fluctuating signal, the interplanetary scintillation of discrete radio sources.
The announcement of the discovery of the first pulsating radio source was made in February 1968 (paper 1) followed by the details of the three others in April (2). The excitement spread rapidly among obser- vers and theorists alike, and their work found a ready forum in Nature where in the next 5 months more than forty papers were published. Two weeks after the first announcement an article from Jodrell Bank (6) described observations of CP 1919 over a wide range of radio frequencies, giving pulse shapes, an average pulse profile, and a description of the remarkable fading pattern of the signal strength. The flood of theory started with two papers (42, 39) only three weeks later.