Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars with periods less than s. When they were first discovered at the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, England, their origin was unknown and they were thought to possible be signals from extraterrestrials. As a result, the first pulsar was named LGM-1, with LGM standing for "Little Green Men." Pulsars were discovered by Jocelyn Bell in the course of her Ph.D. thesis, and appeared in the appendix of her 1968 dissertation. In 1974, Anthony Hewish, Eric Weisstein's World of Biography Bell's thesis advisor, shared the Nobel Prize in physics for Bell's discovery of pulsars.
The fastest known millisecond pulsar is PSR B1937+21, which has a pulsation period of ms. A total of 26 millisecond pulsars were known in the beginning of 1995 (Kospi 1995). Millisecond pulsars are not believed to be formed spinning so fast, but to be sped up by mass dumped onto them by a companion star. In 1992, A. Wolszczan found two planets orbiting the millisecond pulsar PSR B1257+12. There are 3 known gamma-ray pulsars (Science News 1992).
References
--. Science News, 60, Jan. 25, 1992.
"Pulsars Today." Sky & Telescope, 240-244, Sept. 1990.
Bell, J.; Hewish, A.; Pilkington, J. D. H.; Scott, P. F.; and Collins, R. A. "Observation of a Rapidly Pulsating Radio Source." Nature 217, 709, 1968.
Kospi, V. M. "Millisecond Pulsars: Timekeepers of the Cosmos." Sky & Telescope, 19-23, Apr. 1995.
Fruchter, A. S.; Tavani, M.; and Backer, D. C. (Eds.). Millisecond Pulsars: A Decade of Surprise: Proc. Conf. Aspen, Colo., Jan. 1994. San Francisco, CA: Astronom. Soc. of the Pacific, 1995.
Graham-Smith, F. and Lyne, A. G. Pulsar Astronomy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Gurevich, A. V.; Beskin, V. S.; and Istomin, Ya.N. Physics of the Pulsar Magnetosphere. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Lyne, A. G. and Graham-Smith, F. Pulsar Astronomy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Manchester, R. N and Taylor, J. H. Pulsars. San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman, 1977.
Van Riper, K. A.; Epstein, R. I.; and Ho, C. (Eds.). Isolated Pulsars: Proceedings of the Los Alamos Workshop, held in Taos, New Mexico, February 23-28, 1992. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Weisstein, E. W. "Books about Pulsars." http://www.ericweisstein.com/encyclopedias/books/Pulsars.html.
