A real fascinating story of how an 81-year-old former Air Force chap had come forward to announce he saw pulsars well before they were discovered but could not talk about it for half a century until the military instruments he observed them with were decommissioned and de-classified.

In a nutshell, he was using radar for a Ballistic Missile early warning system and noticed a pulsating signal showing up in his data, which was rising 4 mins earlier each day. He asked astronomers after writing down the location, and it was the Crab Pulsar!

The woman who discovered pulsars, Dame Prof. Jocelyn Bell Burnell - agreed with his discoveries.

https://www.nature.com/articles/448974a

Sent this to our team's slack channel overnight, and my supervisor told me he and another one of our team's astronomers were the folks that the Air Force chap got in touch with!

Small world, and a nice Aussie connection!

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article-abstract/983/1/642/620966/An-Independent-1967-Discovery-of-Pulsars?redirectedFrom=PDF

#Astrodon #RadioAstronomy #Pulsars #Defence #Science