Russell A. Hulse
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Russell A. Hulse
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1993
Born: 28 November 1950, New York, NY, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Prize motivation: “for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation”
Prize share: 1/2
Work
Pulsars are very compact stars that radiate radio waves with very regular variations. In 1974 Russell Hulse and James Taylor discovered a pulsar comprised of two stars in very close proximity that rotate around each other. Hulse and Taylor could demonstrate that the stars’ radiation and movements correspond with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Among other things, this theory predicts that the pulsar would emit energy in the form of gravitational waves, which should result in slowly declining intervals. Taylor was able to confirm this in 1978.
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