The discovery of pulsars in 1967 was so unexpected that their astonishingly regular signals briefly raised the possibility of an artificial origin.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, then a graduate student, noticed the repeating pulses while examining kilometers of chart-recorder paper by hand. The source was eventually identified as a rapidly rotating neutron star, opening an entirely new field of astrophysics and revealing one of the most extreme states of matter known.

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