The year was 1967. The Nathu La and Cho La clashes between the Indian and the Chinese armies had just concluded. A war was raging in Vietnam. The space race was at its peak. At this time, a group of astronomers at the University of Cambridge had put together an array of antennae for use as a telescope to study the radio waves emitted by distant stars.
When they started operating the array, two members of the group – Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish – noticed one set of signals that were flashing in a periodic manner. They didn’t know its origins.
We know today that the pair had discovered the first pulsar, named PSR B1919+21.
