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After remaining silent about the discovery for seven months, the Cambridge team published its findings and tentative conclusions in Nature, setting off a flurry of activity among U.S. scientists. Focusing Cornell University's giant radio telescope near Arecibo, Puerto Rico, on the one pulsar whose position was given by the British, Astronomer Frank Drake confirmed the rapid, regular signal and discovered that it was ten times as powerful at 111 MH (for megahertz: 1,000,000 cycles per second) than at any other frequency. "This has been the biggest bombshell that I can remember in radio astronomy," he says. Caltech Astronomer Maarten Schmidt, who discovered the strange nature of quasars, calls the finding "fantastic, incredible."
Oftentimes Overdone. U.S. scientists have already devised a host of theories about pulsars. Yeshiva University Astrophysicist A.G.W. Cameron and Caltech Astronomer John B. Oke believe the mysterious objects may be white dwarfs, Cameron suggesting that their frequency of oscillation is actually a harmonic of the lower frequency assigned to dwarfs by current theory. U.S. Naval Research Physicist Herbert Friedman of the U.S. Naval Research Lab oratory and Cornell Astronomer Thomas Gold support the neutron-star hypothesis. Gold speculates that the first pulsar identified may be an extremely dense body as small as six to 60 miles in diameter that rotates once every 1.337 seconds.
Jodrell Bank Astronomer Bernard Lovell suggests that the observed pulsations "must involve a large fraction of the total energy available in a star like the sun." Thus, he says, "any intelligent beings who were ever in the neighborhood of such events would have been extinguished long ago." But some astronomers feel that they must investigate pulsars more closely before absolutely ruling out the possibility that they are creations of an intelligent race.
"Oftentimes this intelligent-civilization bit has been overdone," says Astronomer Schmidt, "but if you want to attribute anything to a civilization, then this is the best case we have had so far." The chance that pulsar signals do come from an intelligent race, agrees Arecibo's Drake, "does remain a possibility." At week's end, Cambridge astronomers reported in a second Nature article that a faint blue star had been tentatively identified as one of the pulsars, providing still another clue that may eventually help solve astronomy's latest and most exciting enigma.
*Incredibly dense bodies of tightly packed neutrons only ten miles in diameter that are supposedly remnants of supernovae.