Taylor, Joseph Hooton, Jr., 1941–, American astrophysicist, b. Philadelphia, Ph.D. Harvard, 1968. Taylor was a professor at the Univ. of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1969 to 1980, when he joined the faculty of Princeton. He retired from Princeton with emeritus status in 2006. Taylor shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics with Russell Hulse for their discovery in 1974 of the binary pulsar, a system consisting of a rapidly spinning neutron star and a nearby companion object of similar mass and diameter. Their finding and subsequent studies of this new type of pulsar verified the theory of general relativity for a system outside our solar system.
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