Giant Zombie Atoms of the Cosmos

On Aug. 6, 1967, Jocelyn Bell was looking at the squiggles drawn by a red pen on moving rolls of chart paper—the data from a radio telescope she was using to do her Ph.D. research on distant galaxies. She noticed one squiggle that looked odd. It was a “a bit of scruff,” she tells me from her office at Oxford University, where she’s now a visiting professor of astrophysics. The “scruff” was a series of sharp pulses that came every 1.3 seconds. Bell kept on observing it the following nights.

Over the next few months, Bell, her Ph.D. supervisor Antony Hewish, and a few colleagues kept the discovery tightly under wraps while they checked all the possible options, not least whether that was a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence. Bell, half-jokingly, recalls being less than thrilled at the possibility that a bunch of aliens were contacting our planet and hijacking her Ph.D. project just half a year before her thesis defense.

Last week, astronomers were wowed by the symmetry of a neutron star collision.

On Dec. 21, she went to look at the data