The Discovery of Pulsars and the Aftermath

HE DISCOVERY OF PULSARS in 1967 is associated with the names of Anthony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, but the seeds of their achievement were sown long before during the T exciting era when radio astronomy developed from a specialist pursuit of physicists and electrical engineers into a key area of contemporary astronomy. After the Second World War, a number of university groups began the investigation of the nature of the cosmic radio emission, which had been discovered by Karl Jansky in 1933. The principal radio groups involved were those at Cambridge, Manchester, and Sydney. The Cambridge efforts were led by Martin Ryle, who assembled a brilliant team of young physicists, including Graham Smith, Tony Hewish, and Peter Scheuer, to attack these problems. The Cambridge efforts were largely devoted to the development of the technique of aperture synthesis as a means of obtaining high angular resolution and sensitivity by combining coherently the radio signals received by arrays of telescopes.