Sunday, August 19, 2007

Air Force discovers pulsars before Bell

You've probably already seen this, but it's interesting:

http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2007/08/schisler.php

The Air Force early warning radars for the Arctic inadvertently discovered the pulsar before Jocelyn Bell Burnell did in 1967. This joins gamma-ray bursts and adaptive optics as another "thing invented or discovered by the military" before astronomers re-invented or discovered them.

2 comments:

Jennifer said...

AO sort of makes sense, but GRBs?

Dean W. Armstrong said...

The Vela satellites were looking for gamma-rays from nuclear bursts on the Earth, but instead found them coming from the other direction.