Hulse, Russell Alan

Hulse, Russell Alan,

1950–, American astrophysicist, b., New York City, Ph.D. Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1975. Hulse was a researcher at the Princeton's plasma physics laboratory from 1977 until his retirement in 2007. He and Joseph TaylorTaylor, Joseph Hooton, Jr.,
1941–, American astrophysicist, b. Philadelphia, Ph.D. Harvard, 1968. Taylor was a professor at the Univ. of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1969 to 1980, when he joined the faculty of Princeton.
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 were jointly awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery in 1974 of the binary pulsarpulsar,
in astronomy, a neutron star that emits brief, sharp pulses of energy instead of the steady radiation associated with other natural sources. The study of pulsars began when Antony Hewish and his students at Cambridge built a primitive radio telescope to study a
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, a system consisting of a rapidly spinning neutron star and a nearby companion object of similar mass and diameter. Their finding and subsequent studies of this new type of pulsar verified the theory of general relativity for a system outside our solar system.