Word: neutron
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...although British pulsar discoverers initially nicknamed them LGM (little green men), most astronomers have now given up the idea that the four known pulsars might somehow be powerful electronic beacons from a super civilization in distant space. Still in the running is the notion that they may be neutron stars: tiny bodies of densely packed neutrons, which are atomic particles having no electrical charge. The only thing that seems reasonably certain is that the pulsars are not much larger than Earth and are 50 to 400 light-years away. Says Astrophysicist A.G.W. Cameron of Yeshiva University, the conference chairman...
Meanwhile, pulsar theories continued to proliferate beyond the pulsating neutron-star and white-dwarf-star theories first suggested by Cambridge astronomers. Princeton Astrophysicist Jeremiah Ostriker suggested that the signals might be caused by rapidly rotating white dwarfs with a local disturbance on their surfaces. Signals from the disturbance would sweep across the earth like a lighthouse beacon once during each rotation of such a star. British Astrophysicists Fred Hoyle and J. Narlikar propose that the signals are connected with supernovas, or exploding stars...
Enormously Wasteful. Several scientists have theorized that the pulses may be caused by white dwarf or neutron stars rotating rapidly around each other in a binary system; any particles passing through the rotating and intense magnetic field that must exist between the two stars would produce strong radiation that would periodically sweep the earth. Others have suggested that the intense gravity of a star in such a binary system would act as a lens, periodically intensifying and focusing the radiation from the twin star passing behind...
Ramsey and his colleagues began by putting very slow neutrons in a weak magnetic field, causing them to precess like tops. These spinning neutrons were directed through a strong electric field which would cause a dipole to change its precession frequency. However, the physicists recorded no change in the spinning of the neutron...
Previous work on the charge structure of the neutron had determined that if a dipole existed, the dipole moment divided by the charge on the proton of the particle must be less than 5 x 10 to the negative 20th centimeter. Ramsey's work through January, 1968, has lowered this limit by a factor of 1000, and still no evidence for the existence of the dipole has been found...