Four decades after the release of the Unknown Pleasures album, we now understand much better what those wiggly lines on its cover mean. But many questions remain about these enigmatic objects, which in many respects are nature’s most extreme creation. Something that remained true for all these years is that pulsar recordings push us to explore the limits of our understanding of the laws of physics.
Forty years ago, the English rock band Joy Division released its debut studio album, Unknown Pleasures. The front cover doesn’t feature any words, only a now-iconic black-and-white data graph showing 80 wiggly lines. To put it simply, it’s data from space. To mark the anniversary of the album, we recorded a signal from the same object in space with a radio telescope in Jodrell Bank Observatory, only 14 miles (23 km) away from Strawberry Studios, where the album was recorded.
Some random brilliant record sleeves: Joy Division "Unknown Pleasures" pic.twitter.com/gQVKTEIyyq
— Phil Stanley (@judgeschneider1) August 7, 2014
Peter Saville—graphic designer and cofounder of Factory Records—designed the album cover based on a picture spotted by band member Bernard Sumner in an encyclopedia. The picture itself can be traced to the work of postgraduate student Harold Craft, who published the image in his PhD thesis in 1970 after Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967. But what exactly are the wiggly lines?
Unknown treasures in space
What we see in this enigmatic image is the signal produced by a pulsar known as B1919+21, the first pulsar ever discovered. A pulsar is formed during the violent death of a star several times more massive than our sun. These stars go out with a bang known as a “supernova explosion,” during which the core of the exploding star is compressed into an almost perfect sphere with a radius of little more than 10 km. What’s formed is called a neutron star.
These flashes from pulsars are especially bright at radio wavelengths, so their signals can be recorded using radio telescopes. A radio telescope works similar to a radio in your car—its antenna focuses radio waves from space onto a point where they can be detected and turned into an electric signal, which can then be converted into sound. We used the Mark II radio telescope of the Jodrell Bank Observatory at the University of Manchester for our recording.
Patrick Weltevrede is a lecturer in pulsar astrophysics at the University of Manchester. This post was originally published on The Conversation.
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