Russell Hulse

Biography

Born in 1950 in New York. He studied at Cooper Union, then at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he received his doctorate in 1975. As a graduate student, he worked with Taylor at the Arecibo radio telescope laboratory, where they made their famous discovery. He later worked at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993.

Key discoveries

• Discovery of the first binary pulsar (with Taylor) in 1974
• detection
• that the pulsar–neutron star system exhibits the orbital period decay predicted by general relativity due to gravitational wave emission
• which became the first indirect confirmation of Einstein's waves.