Clocks in the Sky: The Story of Pulsars

Springer Praxis Books: Popular Astronomy

by Geoff McNamara

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars, the collapsed cores of once massive stars that ended their lives as supernova explosions. Pulsar rotation rates can reach incredible speeds, up to hundreds of times per second. The story of how an object ‘spins up’ to a significant fraction of the speed of light is fascinating and involves collapsing stellar cores following supernova explosions, while the faster ones result from stellar cannibalism.

In this book, Geoff McNamara explores the history, subsequent discovery and contemporary research into pulsar astronomy. The story of pulsars is brought right up to date with the announcement in 2006 of a new breed of pulsar, Rotating Radio Transients (RRATs), which emit short bursts of radio signals separated by long pauses. These may outnumber conventional radio pulsars by a ratio of four to one. Geoff McNamara ends by pointing out that, despite the enormous success of pulsar research in the second half of the twentieth century, the real discoveries are yet to be made including, perhaps, the detection of the hypothetical pulsar black hole binary system by the proposed Square Kilometre Array - the largest single radio telescope in the world.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Astronomy

204 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2008

Reviews

[Usfromdk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy to read, included some interesting/fascinating stuff. This is at times as much a history book as it is a book on astronomical phenomena, and people without a background in physics should not be afraid of giving the book a shot. To me the coverage felt too superficial as there was no (explicit) math (equations); the author repeatedly had to resort to analogies to explain key principles, which some people will find helpful but which I usually find annoying. There was a bit of what I'd term 'irrelevant fluff' along the way in the book, but not a great deal of it. Despite the shortcomings I however liked the book enough to give it 3 stars (though I am much closer to two stars than four), and I'd note that many people will probably like the book better than I did.

It would be very easy for an author to write a book on topics like these which would be completely unreadable for anyone without a background in physics (I've come across such books on related topics before), or vice versa a contentless book which would shy away from giving you even a semi-detailed account because of the author's fear that you would not understand the details anyway - and this book does not fit into either of these two categories. It reminded me a bit of the Gresham College astronomy lectures, though historical aspects are in this book perhaps given more attention than they are given in those lectures. The author is fascinated by the phenomena he covers in the book, and given the way the book is written it's not hard to understand why.