Hulse, Russell (1950- )

US physicist and radio astronomer who, with Joseph H Taylor, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1993 for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, called a binary pulsar. The pulsar had an invisible companion orbiting around it and radiated gravitational waves. These waves had been predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity but this was the first experimental confirmation of their reality.

Hulse and Taylor discovered the pulsar in 1974, when Hulse was a postgraduate student, supervised by Taylor, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. The two astronomers detected a small regular change in the intervals between the radio pulses emitted by a pulsar called PSR1913+16. This occurred because the pulsar was orbiting another body. Furthermore the pulses were slowing down in a regular way, losing about 75 microseconds a year. This was due to energy being lost as gravitational waves were emitted.

In 1977 Hulse moved to the Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University, New Jersey, to work on computer models of how plasmas - very hot ionized gases - behave when subjected to a strong magnetic field.