Hulse, Russell Alan

Hulse, Russell Alan, 1950–, American astrophysicist, b., New York City, Ph.D. Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1975. Hulse was a researcher at the Princeton's plasma physics laboratory from 1977 until his retirement in 2007. He and Joseph Taylor were jointly awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery in 1974 of the binary pulsar, a system consisting of a rapidly spinning neutron star and a nearby companion object of similar mass and diameter. Their finding and subsequent studies of this new type of pulsar verified the theory of general relativity for a system outside our solar system.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

See more Encyclopedia articles on: Physics: Biographies