Russell A. Hulse | Biography

Russell Alan Hulse was born on November 28, 1950, in New York City. His parents, Alan Hulse and the former Betty Joan Wedemeyer, encouraged his interest and understanding of the world around him. As a boy, Hulse enjoyed working with chemistry and mechanical engineering construction sets as well as biology dissection kits. In 1963 he was admitted to the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, a facility devoted to the encouragement of scientific values.

Following graduation in 1966, he was admitted to Cooper Union. He received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1970 and started graduate school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst the same year. "When I was approached by Joe Taylor...to see if I was interested in doing a pulsar search for my thesis, it did not take too long for me to agree," he remembered in his Nobel acceptance lecture.

Intermittently from December 1973 until January 1975, Hulse and fellow astrophysicist, Joseph H. Taylor, Jr., used the Arecibo telescope, the world's largest single-element radio telescope located in Puerto Rico, to search the skies for the weak radio signals emitted by pulsars. With a detailed computer program of his own design, he was able to detect some 50 pulsars, 40 of which had never been identified. When analyzing data from a pulsar first detected on July 2, 1974, he noticed an unexpected variation in the pulsar's period. After days of checking and reviewing data, Hulse realized that he had discovered a binary pulsar (two stars orbiting around a common axis). Unlike others, this pulsar was in a binary system in which one component releases rapid pulses of radio energy. Pulsars, which are rarely more than thirteen kilometers wide yet are as massive as the sun, are extremely dense stars composed mostly of neutrons rather than whole atoms.

When Taylor and Hulse measured variations in their pulsar's "pulse rate," about six one-hundredths of a second between pulses, the only way these variations could be explained was in terms of a Doppler shift due to the pulse rate's orbital motion of an unseen companion star. Detailed timing measurements of these pulses over twenty years helped confirm Einstein's relativity theory. For their discovery Taylor and Hulse were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1993.

In 1975 Hulse received his Ph.D. in physics and accepted a post-doctoral appointment at the National Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he continued his work in radio astronomy. Although he enjoyed the challenge of astronomy, he had serious concerns about "the lack of long-term career prospects in astronomy," as he noted in his Nobel biography. Thus in 1977, when he noticed an advertisement in Physics Today for a physicist working with controlled fusion at the Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), he applied for the job. For more than a decade, Hulse has conducted research on hydrogen fusion at PPPL, and he continues to do so today. In 1994 he was involved in computer modeling of impurity ions and electron transport in the high-temperature plasmas of the controlled thermonuclear fusion devices, as well as working on advanced computer software. Hulse is a member of the American Physical Society and the American Astronomical Society.