Russell A. Hulse
active c. 1950, New York City, New York, USA
American astrophysicist who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the first binary pulsar, a cosmic laboratory for testing general relativity.
Born in New York City, Hulse built his first radio telescope as a boy. As a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst working with Joseph Taylor, he used the Arecibo Observatory's 305-m dish in 1974 for a pulsar survey and found PSR B1913+16 — a pulsar orbiting an unseen companion every 7.75 hours. Its precisely timed pulses let Taylor's group measure orbital decay matching general relativity's prediction for gravitational-wave emission. After earning his PhD in 1975, Hulse moved to the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, working on fusion modeling until retirement in 2007.
Nobel-winning work
In July 1974, during the Arecibo pulsar survey, Hulse noticed that PSR B1913+16's period varied periodically by ±27 μs — the Doppler signature of an orbit around a companion neutron star. This 'Hulse–Taylor pulsar' is the tightest relativistic binary known, with periastron advance of 4.2° per year (vs. 0.0003°/century for Mercury).
Timing over decades showed the orbital period shrinking at exactly the rate general relativity predicts for energy carried away by gravitational waves — the first indirect confirmation of gravitational radiation, decades before LIGO's direct detection, and the basis of Nobel-quality tests of strong-field gravity.
Workplaces: Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, University of Massachusetts Amherst
United States