Word: pulsars
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
Checking on the faint blue star that Cambridge University astronomers have associated with pulsar 1, Astronomer William Liller located it on a number of Harvard Observatory photographs taken between 1897 and 1952. During that interval, he reported, the average visible light from the star had not varied significantly. And in California, Astronomer Allan Sandage announced that he plans to train the 200-in. Mount Palomar telescope on the blue star to detect any second-by-second variation in its light intensity that might coincide with pulsar 1's radio variation...
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...
...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...