Researchers including Joseph Taylor discovered the binary pulsar PSR B1913+16, two neutron stars orbiting each other, while working out of Arecibo and Princeton. By tracking the pulsar signals over time, they found the orbit was slowly decaying, and calculated that the energy loss matched exactly what Einstein's general relativity predicts if that energy is being carried away as gravitational waves. This gave the first indirect evidence for gravitational waves, and the discovery earned the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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54:15and Joseph Taylor at um Aerosibo. They were working at Princeton at the time. Um they discovered the binary pulsar PSR V1913 +16. Two pulsars that are rotating around one another. P pulsars are are themselves rotating neutron stars. And by looking at the signal of those pulsars rotating, they could see that the orbit was decaying. Now why is it decaying? Because energy is leaving the system through gravitational waves, not through normal light. They applied Einstein's general relativity and they found an exact match from theory and experiment. That's the curve on the left hand side. You see the curve of
54:55Einstein's relativity and the data points are exactly on top of it. They earned the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics.