Russell Alan Hulse

Russell Alan Hulse was born in 1950 in New York City. He attended the Bronx High School of Science and earned a bachelor's degree from Cooper Union in 1970, before going on to graduate study in physics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he joined Joseph Taylor's group. His doctoral project was an ambitious pulsar survey using the 305-meter Arecibo radio telescope, designed to find faint and unusual pulsars by sifting computer-processed radio data for periodic signals.

In the summer of 1974 Hulse, then a 24-year-old graduate student working largely alone at Arecibo, detected a pulsar catalogued PSR B1913+16 spinning about 17 times per second. When he returned to confirm it, the pulse period refused to stay constant — it drifted earlier and later on a cycle of just under eight hours. Rather than dismiss the wandering signal as noise or instrumental error, Hulse correctly interpreted it: the pulsar was in a binary orbit, its pulses Doppler-shifted as it swung toward and away from Earth. He had found the first binary pulsar, a system that would become the most important gravitational laboratory of its era.

The discovery turned a tight neutron-star binary into a precision clock that could be tracked through general-relativistic effects. Although Hulse soon left pulsar astronomy — moving into plasma physics and fusion research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory — the binary pulsar he found, refined by years of timing, showed an orbital decay that matched gravitational-wave emission to remarkable precision. It was the first evidence that accelerating masses radiate gravitational waves, as Einstein had predicted in 1918.

Hulse shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics with Joseph Taylor for the discovery. In later years he became deeply involved in science education and outreach, joining the University of Texas at Dallas to promote STEM teaching. His name is permanently attached to the Hulse–Taylor binary, the system whose famous parabola of orbital-decay data is one of the cleanest confirmations of general relativity ever recorded.