Neutron Stars and Pulsars: Challenges and Opportunities after 80 Years

Ever since the first pulsar was discovered by Bell and Hewish over 40 years ago,we’ve known that not only are pulsars fascinating and truly exotic objects, but that we can usethem as powerful tools for basic physics and astrophysics as well. Taylor and Hulse hammeredthese views home with their discovery and timing of the spectacular “binary pulsar” in the 1970sand 1980s. In the last two decades a host of surprises and a promise of phenomenal scientificriches in the future has come from the millisecond pulsars. As our instrumentation has becomemore sensitive and better suited to measuring the pulses from these objects, they’ve given usnew tests of general relativity, fantastic probes of the interstellar medium, constraints on thephysics of ultra-dense matter, new windows into binary and stellar evolution, and the promiseof a direct detection of gravitational waves. These things really are cool, and there is much morewe will do with them in the future.