ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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_______________________ What Is A Pulsar?


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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When I wrote the scene in The Wishbone Express that described the maneuver the ship makes to shake several missiles off its tail, I used a pulsar.

Before writing the scene I spoke with an astronomer at the Fernbank Science Center's observatory in Atlanta. I asked him if I was right in thinking that the old "cosmic lighthouse" description of a pulsar's radiation was not very accurate. The beams do not shoot straight from the spinning star like the beams from a lighthouse.

They can't do that because the source of the radiation keeps turning around while the radiation moves away as parallel waves over the vast expanse of space.

In other words, they form a spiral. The astronomer said I was right.

Because the pulsar is rotating, the radiation more closely resembles the water from a spinning lawn sprinkler than it does a light house beam.





The waves of radiation would flow outward from the pulsar at the speed of light, but if you could actually see the radiation as (for example) red lines on a computer simulation, and the area around the pulsar being depicted in the simulation was millions of miles across, the radiated energy would form a spiral that moved away from the pulsar.

The signals from pulsars we receive with radio telescopes on Earth are caused by each successive wave of energy washing past us at the speed of light. The distance between each wave in the spiral is determined by how fast the pulsar is spinning.

If it spun only one time per second, for example, the waves would be 0.5 light seconds apart, because pulsars sends out two beams on each side.

And that's why I made the illustration for that scene in The Wishbone Express the way it looks below. It shows the ship's cockpit canopy/computer display as it enhances the view ahead with its CGI image of the star and the radiation moving outward in ripple-like waves.





I'm rather proud of having thought of that idea, and I'm fond of the illustration I created for the scene, too.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)