Andrew Lyne
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Andrew G. Lyne (born 1942) is a British physicist. Lyne is Langworthy Professor of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester, as well as director of the Jodrell Bank Observatory and leader of its Pulsar Group.
Professor Lyne was educated at the Portsmouth Grammar school, and the University of Cambridge (natural sciences), continuing to the University of Manchester for a PhD in Radio Astronomy.
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Professor A.G. Lyne writes on his homepage at http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~agl, "I am mostly interested in finding and understanding radio pulsars in all their various forms and with their various companions. Presently, I am most occupied with the development of new multibeam search systems at Jodrell and Parkes, in order to probe deeper into the Galaxy, particularly for millisecond pulsars, young pulsars and any that might be in binary systems."
[edit] Pulsar Planet?
Lyne (and colleague M. Bailes) thought that he had made a remarkable discovery in 1991, when he reported that he and colleagues had discovered a pulsar orbited by a planetary companion, which would have been a first at the time. However, after this was announced, the group went back and checked its work, and found that his team had not properly removed the effects of the Earth's motion around the Sun from their analysis, and, when the calculations were redone correctly, the pulse variations that led to their conclusions disappeared, and that there was in fact no planet around PSR 1829-10. What is singular about all this (at least from the viewpoint of a layman) is that when Professor Lyne announced the retraction of his results, he received a standing ovation from his scientific colleagues for having the intellectual integrity and the courage to admit this error publicly.
[edit] Binary Pulsar
No retraction was necessary in 2003, when Lyne and his team discovered J0737-3039, the first binary system found in which both components were pulsed neutron stars. Lyne's colleague Richard Manchester called the PSR J0737-3039 system a "fantastic natural laboratory" for studying specialized effects of the General Theory of Relativity. Other recent work that Dr. Lyne has undertaken includes research on the globular cluster at 47 Tucanae, evidently something of a nursery for pulsars of both the standard and millisecond variety.
[edit] In Popular Culture
The American band Neutrino wrote and recorded a song named for Lyne, and included it on their 1998 album Improved Hearing Through Amplification.
