The 2006 vote on the planetary status of Pluto has had a long-lasting reverberation throughout astronomy. Dr. Belle’s own accidental involvement in this question had its own amusing tall tale, which he recounted along the way to re-examining a question: What is a planet, and why do we care?
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Pulsars are the rapidly rotating, super-dense remnants of massive stars. They emit directed “light-house-like” beams of radio waves that we detect on earth when the beams sweep across our galactic location. By carefully timing the arrival of these beams we can learn a surprising amount about pulsars and their environment; we can even learn about the nature of the space-time through which the beams sweep.
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