Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. (born March 29, 1941) is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
astrophysicist and
Nobel Prize in PhysicsThe Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded once a year by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895 and awarded since 1901; the others are the Nobel Prize in chemistry, Nobel Prize in literature, Nobel Peace Prize, and...
laureate for his discovery with
Russell Alan HulseRussell Alan Hulse is an American physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with his thesis advisor Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr., "for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation"...
of a "new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation."
Biography
Taylor was born in Philadelphia to Joseph Hooton Taylor, Sr., and Sylvia Evans Taylor, both of whom had
QuakerThe Religious Society of Friends is a religious movement, whose members are known as Friends or Quakers. The roots of this movement are with some 17th century Christian English dissenters, but today the movement has branched out into many independent national and regional organizations, called...
roots for many generations, and grew up in
Cinnaminson Township, New JerseyCinnaminson Township is a Township in Burlington County, New Jersey, United States. Cinnaminson Township borders the Delaware River, and is an eastern suburb of Philadelphia. As of the United States 2000 Census, the township population was 14,595....
. He attended the
Moorestown Friends SchoolMoorestown Friends School is a private Quaker school located at East Main Street and Chester Avenue in Moorestown, New Jersey. The school serves students from Preschool through 12th grade...
in Moorestown, New Jersey, where he excelled in math. He received a
B.A.Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences or both....
in
physicsPhysics is a natural science; it is the study of matter and its motion through spacetime and all that derives from these, such as energy and force...
at
Haverford CollegeHaverford College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college located in Haverford, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia.The college was founded in 1833 by area members of the Orthodox Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends to ensure an education grounded in Quaker...
in 1963, and a
Ph.D.Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated PhD , for the Latin , meaning "teacher of philosophy", or alternatively, DPhil, for the equivalent , is an advanced academic degree awarded by universities...
in
astronomyAstronomy is the scientific study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the Earth's atmosphere...
at
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units...
in 1968. After a brief research position at Harvard, Taylor went to the
University of MassachusettsThe University of Massachusetts is the five-campus public university system of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts....
, eventually becoming
ProfessorThe meaning of the word professor varies. In some English-speaking countries, it refers to a senior academic who holds a departmental chair, especially as head of the department, or a personal chair awarded specifically to that individual...
of Astronomy and Associate Director of the
Five College Radio Astronomy ObservatoryThe Five College Radio Astronomical Observatory was founded in 1969 by the Five College Astronomy Department . From its inception, the observatory has emphasized research, the development of technology and the training of students—both graduate and undergraduate...
. Taylor's thesis work was on
lunar occultationAn occultation is an event that occurs when one object is hidden by another object that passes between it and the observer. The word is used in astronomy and can also be used in a general sense to describe when an object in the foreground occults objects in the background...
measurements. About the time he completed his Ph.D., Jocelyn Bell discovered the first radio pulsars with a telescope near
CambridgeThe city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. It is also at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen....
,
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
.
Career
Taylor immediately went to the
National Radio Astronomy ObservatoryThe National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center of the United States National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc for the purpose of radio astronomy...
's telescopes in
Green Bank, West VirginiaGreen Bank is a community in Pocahontas County in West Virginia's Potomac Highlands inside the Allegheny Mountain Range. Green Bank is located along WV 28. It is home to the Green Bank Telescope, the world's largest fully-steerable radio telescope, which is operated by the National Radio Astronomy...
, and participated in the discovery of the first pulsars discovered outside Cambridge. Since then, he has worked on all aspects of pulsar astrophysics. In 1974, Hulse and Taylor discovered the first
pulsarPulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation. The observed periods of their pulses range from 1.4 milliseconds to 8.5 seconds. The radiation can only be observed when the beam of emission is pointing towards the Earth. This is called the...
in a
binaryA binary star is a star system consisting of two stars orbiting around their common center of mass. The brighter star is called the primary and the other is its companion star, comes, or secondary...
system, named PSR B1913+16 after its position in the sky, during a survey for pulsars at the
Arecibo ObservatoryThe Arecibo Observatory is a radio telescope located close to the city of Arecibo in Puerto Rico. It is operated by Cornell University under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The observatory works as the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center although both names are...
in
Puerto RicoPuerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is a self-governing unincorporated territory of the United States located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of the Virgin Islands...
. Although it was not understood at the time, this was also the first of what are now called
recycled pulsars:
neutron starA neutron star is a type of remnant that can result from the gravitational collapse of a massive star during a Type II, Type Ib or Type Ic supernova event. Such stars are composed almost entirely of neutrons, which are subatomic particles without electrical charge and roughly the same mass as protons...
s that have been spun-up to fast spin rates by the transfer of mass onto their surfaces from a companion star.
The orbit of this binary system is slowly shrinking as it loses
energyIn physics, energy is a scalar physical quantity that describes the amount of work that can be performed by a force, an attribute of objects and systems that is subject to a conservation law...
because of emission of gravitational radiation, causing its orbital period to speed up slightly. The rate of shrinkage can be precisely predicted from Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, and over a thirty-year period Taylor and his colleagues have made measurements that match this prediction to much better than one percent accuracy. This was the first confirmation of the existence of gravitational radiation. There are now scores of binary pulsars known, and independent measurements have confirmed Taylor's results.
In 1980, he moved to
Princeton UniversityPrinceton University a private university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League and is considered one of the Colonial Colleges....
, where he was the
James S. McDonnellJames Smith McDonnell was an aviation pioneer and founder of McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, later McDonnell Douglas....
Distinguished University Professor in Physics, having also served for six years as
DeanIn academic administration, a dean is a person with significant authority over a specific academic unit, or over a specific area of concern, or both...
of
FacultyA faculty is a division within a university comprising one subject area, or a number of related subject areas...
. He retired in 2006.
Amateur Radio
Joe Taylor first obtained his
amateur radio licenseAn amateur radio license is a legal document or permit giving official permission to the license holder to operate an amateur radio station. The license typically permits the bearer to transmit a signal on designated radio frequencies in order to conduct two-way communications with other licensed...
as a teenager, which led him to the field of radio astronomy. Taylor is well known in the field of
amateur radioAmateur radio, often called ham radio, is both a hobby and a service in which participants, called "hams," use various types of radio communications equipment to communicate with other radio amateurs for public service, recreation and self-training....
weak signal communication and was assigned the
call signIn broadcasting and radio communications, a call sign is a unique designation for a transmitting station. In some countries they are used as names for broadcasting stations, but in many other countries they are not...
K1JT by the FCC. He wrote WSJT ("Weak Signal/Joe Taylor"), a software package and protocol suite that utilizes computer-generated messages in conjunction with radio
transceiverA transceiver is a device that has both a transmitter and a receiver which are combined and share common circuitry or a single housing. If no circuitry is common between transmit and receive functions, the device is a transmitter-receiver. The term originated in the early 1920s. Technically,...
s to communicate over long distances with other amateur radio operators. WSJT is useful for passing short messages via non-traditional radio communications methods, such as
moonbounceEarth-Moon-Earth, also known as moon bounce, is a radio communications technique which relies on the propagation of radio waves from an Earth-based transmitter directed via reflection from the surface of the Moon back to an Earth-based receiver....
and meteor scatter and other low
signal-to-noise ratioSignal-to-noise ratio is an electrical engineering measurement, also used in other fields , defined as the ratio of a signal power to the noise power corrupting the signal...
paths. It is also useful for extremely long-distance contacts using very low power transmissions.
Honours and awards
Taylor has used this first
binaryA binary star is a star system consisting of two stars orbiting around their common center of mass. The brighter star is called the primary and the other is its companion star, comes, or secondary...
pulsarPulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation. The observed periods of their pulses range from 1.4 milliseconds to 8.5 seconds. The radiation can only be observed when the beam of emission is pointing towards the Earth. This is called the...
to make high-precision tests of
general relativityGeneral relativity or the general theory of relativity is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1916. It is the current description of gravitation in modern physics. It unifies special relativity and Newton's law of universal gravitation, and describes gravity as a...
. Working with his colleague Joel Weisberg, Taylor has used observations of this pulsar to demonstrated the existence of gravitational radiation in the amount and with the properties first predicted by
Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein was a theoretical physicist. His many contributions to physics include the special and general theories of relativity, the founding of relativistic cosmology, the first post-Newtonian expansion, explaining the perihelion advance of Mercury, prediction of the deflection of...
. He and
HulseRussell Alan Hulse is an American physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with his thesis advisor Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr., "for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation"...
shared the
Nobel PrizeThe Nobel Prize is a Sweden-based international monetary prize. The award was established by the 1895 will and estate of Swedish chemist and inventor Alfred Nobel. It was first awarded in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace in 1901...
for the discovery of this object.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Taylor has been recognized with many other awards, including the first
Heineman PrizeThe Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics is jointly awarded each year by the American Astronomical Society and American Institute of Physics for outstanding work in astrophysics. It is funded by the Heineman Foundation in honour of Dannie Heineman....
of the
American Astronomical SocietyThe American Astronomical Society is a US society of professional astronomers and other interested individuals, headquartered in Washington, DC. The basic objective of the AAS is to promote the advancement of astronomy and closely related branches of science...
, the
Henry Draper MedalThe Henry Draper Medal was established by the widow of Henry Draper, and is awarded by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences for contributions to astrophysics.The recipients have been:-External links:*...
of the
National Academy of SciencesThe National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine."The group holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code....
, the Tomalla Foundation Prize, the
Magellanic PremiumThe Magellanic Premium, also known as the Magellanic Gold Medal and Magellanic Prize is awarded for major contributions in the field of navigation , astronomy, or natural philosophy....
, the Carty Award for the Advancement of Science, the
Albert Einstein MedalThe Albert Einstein Medal is an award presented by the Albert Einstein Society in Bern. First given in 1979, the award is presented to people who have "rendered outstanding services" in connection with Albert Einstein each year.- Recipients :...
, the
Wolf Prize in PhysicsThe Wolf Prize in Physics is awarded once a year by the Wolf Foundation. It is one of the six Wolf Prizes established by the Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are in Agriculture, Chemistry, Mathematics, Medicine and Arts. The Prize is often considered the most prestigious award in...
, and the
Karl Schwarzschild MedalThe Karl Schwarzschild Medal, named after the astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild, is an award presented by the Astronomische Gesellschaft to eminent astronomers and astrophysicists.-Recipients:...
. He was among the first group of MacArthur Fellows. He has served on many boards, committees, and panels, co-chairing the Decadal Panel of that produced the report
Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium that established the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
's national priorities in astronomy and astrophysics for the period 2000-2010.
External links