This is not the case for a close binary pulsar, a system of two orbiting neutron stars, one of which is a pulsar: from the pulsar, observers on Earth receive a regular series of radio pulses that can serve as a highly accurate clock, which allows precise measurements of the orbital period.
Radio telescope observations of relativistic phenomena in binary pulsar systems yield straightforward and robust determinations of the masses of pulsars and their companion stars.
With its enormous interacting gravitational fields, the binary pulsar should emit such waves, and the resulting energy drain should reduce the orbital distance between the two stars.
American astronomers Russell Hulse and Joseph H. Taylor, Jr., used Arecibo to discover the first binary pulsar.
The 1993 Nobel Prize for Physics commemorated the 1974 discovery of the binary pulsar by two astrophysicists of the University of Massachusetts, Joseph H. Taylor, Jr., and Russell A. Hulse.
Related sites Background on Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the first binary pulsar Parkes Observatory Jodrell Bank Observatory.
For ordinary stars like the Sun, this energy loss would be too small to be detectable, but this energy loss was observed in 1974 in a binary pulsar called PSR1913+16.
High Mass X-ray Binary Pulsars (HMXBP), in which the companion star is a source of supersonic stellar wind, provide a laboratory to probe the velocity and density profile of such winds.
Since then, several other binary pulsars have been found, in particular the double pulsar PSR J0737-3039, in which both stars are pulsars.
Celebrity academics There's Professor Chris Budd in maths and Jocelyn Bell Burnell is famous for discovering pulsar stars.
This effect has been observed before: several times in so-called binary pulsars, and just recently in a binary white-dwarf system 3,000 light years away.
