This year marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the first pulsar by Anthony Hewish and then-Phd student Jocelyn Bell Burnell. The Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester is hosting a major conference to celebrate this landmark discovery – the IAU Symposium 337: Pulsar Astrophysics: The Next Fifty Years
More than 200 participants will discuss some of the major achievements of the last five decades, recent research breakthroughs and future directions for this field of astronomy, which, among other things, has been responsible for testing Einstein’s theory of general relativity on multiple occasions and is credited for the discovery of the first planets outside our Solar System.
The 50 Years of Pulsars IAU 337 Symposium has received generous funding from the International Astronomical Union, RadioNet, the Square Kilometre Array organisation and The University of Manchester.