Cinderella Bell And Hewish

he first pulsar was discovered by chance by Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish in 1967 who were actually studying distant galaxies at the time. Jocelyn Bell noticed small pulses of radiation when their telescope was looking at a particular position in the sky and for a short time scientists thought they might be coming from an extra-terrestrial civilisation. In fact the source of these pulses were initially referred to as LGM1, Little Green Man 1. Once established that the signals were not of this origin (and also not caused by people on Earth), the unidentified object they were coming from was called a "pulsar" because the emission was pulsed. The pulsar discovered by Bell and Hewish is now called PSR B1919+21: PSR stands for Pulsating Source