Word: pulsare
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Match with Cesium. If earth time does indeed slow down relative to the pulsar clock in January, and speed up correspondingly in June, the pulsar signals (which have blipped at a constant frequency since they were discovered) would appear to increase their repetition rates as earth clocks slowed down and decrease them as earth time speeded up. Hoffmann's plan was immediately snapped up by Dror Sadeh, a Tel Aviv University physicist currently attached to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory at Washington...
Sadeh feels sure that by January he should be able to detect an apparent speedup in the pulsar clock when compared with its rate this month-a clear indication that earth time has slowed by the same amount. If Einstein was right, that observed slowdown will total about 1/ 100th of a second per year. "If our measurements are accurate and we don't get this result," says Hoffmann, "then we scientists-and the Einstein theory-are in trouble...
...more that astronomers learn about pulsars, the still-to-be-identified bodies that are sending strange beeping signals from the Milky Way, the more difficult to identify the pulsars become. Last week, at a Manhattan gathering of the growing group of pulsar specialists, scientists from the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and the Lick Observatory in California disclosed that Pulsar I not only sends out high-frequency radio signals every 1.3 seconds, but also gives off light flashes just about half as often. The conferees were beginning to ponder this new information when a tardy University of California astronomer...
What does it all mean? The confusing combination of light and radio pulses has persuaded most astronomers that pulsars are not white dwarfs (small, dying stars). And 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...
...distant, advanced civilizations. While admitting this possibility, Astronomer Drake, for one, stresses that there are strong arguments against it. The signals, he notes, are transmitted over a very wide range of frequencies-an "enormously wasteful" procedure not to be expected of superintelligent beings. And if the signals from pulsar 1 are being transmitted in all directions from a distance of a few hundred light-years away from earth, the power level of the transmitting source must be about ten billion times greater than the entire electrical generating capacity of our civilization-"too high," Drake says, "to be plausible...