Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. Complete Bio & Career
Taylor studied at Haverford College, Pennsylvania (B.A., 1963), and earned a PhD in astronomy at Harvard University in 1968. He taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, from 1969 to 1981 and then joined the faculty at Princeton University, where he became the James S. McDonnell Professor of Physics in 1986 and professor emeritus in 2006.
Taylor and Hulse conducted their prizewinning research on pulsars while Taylor was a professor at Amherst and Hulse was his graduate student. In 1974, using the large radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, they discovered a pulsar (a rapidly spinning neutron star) emitting radio pulses at intervals that varied in a regular pattern, decreasing and increasing over an eight-hour period. They concluded from these signals that the pulsar must be alternately moving toward and away from the Earth—i.e., that it must be orbiting around a companion star, which the two men deduced was also a neutron star.
Their discovery of the first binary pulsar, PSR 1913 + 16, provided an unprecedented test of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravitation, which, according to the general theory of relativity, predicts that objects accelerated in a strong gravitational field will emit radiation in the form of gravitational waves.
Taylor and Hulse timed PSR 1913 + 16’s pulses over the next few years and showed that the two stars are indeed rotating ever faster around each other in an increasingly tight orbit. Taylor continued making careful measurements of the orbital period of PSR 1913 + 16, and his research group went on to discover several other binary pulsars.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Taylor received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1992. He also was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1981.