45 years ago, a graduate student in England noticed something strange.  She was studying the radio emissions of stars when her antenna array picked up an extraordinarily regular beep-beep-beep coming from ... where?  Regular radio signals are common on Earth and her thesis advisor insisted that's what the beeping had to be — some Earthly interference.  She didn't think so.  The source of the signal rose and set with the stars:  like the stars, and unlike Earth sources, it rose almost 4 minutes earlier each day.  Clearly, she thought, the radio signal was coming from outer space.

Most strangely, the signals were more than extraordinarily regular, they were more precisely regular than the watch on your wrist.  Could natural signals possibly be that regular?  Could the signals coming from the stars be artificial, a product of some alien civilization?  The LGM hypothesis — "LGM" was a tongue-in-cheek reference to little green men — was considered.

But a second source of highly-regular signals was detected, and then a third.  Jocelyn Bell Burnell had discovered the pulsar, a neutron star whose rapid spin generates extremely regular radio pulses.  The public announcement was issued on February 24, 1968.  Burnell's thesis advisor won a Nobel Prize for the discovery.

45 years ago came a reminder that amazing things still wait to tickle our imaginations.

Or, as one American writer put it,


     The clouds within the Milky Way
     May well be diamonds, proudly say
     Astronomers at U. of C.
     The atmospheres of two or three
     "Cool stars" could concentrate and freeze
     More ice than winks at Tiffany's.

     The pulsars, lately found to beep
     Six times or so a sec., still keep
     Themselves invisible, but are,
     Perhaps, a kind of neutron star
     So dense a cubic inch would tip
     The scales against a battleship.

     The moon, the men who jumped it swear,
     Is like a spheric sandbox where
     A child has dabbled; gray and black
     Were all the colors they brought back.
     The mad things dreamt up in the sky
     Discomfort our philosophy.


	 	 — John Updike:  "Skyey Developments," Collected Poems, 1953-1993 (Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, 1993), p. 334.


	 	 	 Keep dreaming up!
	 	 	 - Bob Hamlin
	 	 	 <rhamlinatdartmouth.edu>

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