Hulse, Russell A.

Hulse, Russell A.

(1950– ) physicist; born in New York City. His discovery of a binary pulsar while a graduate assistant to Joseph Taylor, astronomy professor at the University of Massachusetts: Amherst, helped to confirm the existence of gravitational waves as predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity. For this 1974 discovery, he and Taylor were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1993. At the Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory from 1977, Hulse studied hydrogen fusion.