The Virtuosi: Beards and Pulsars

The Hulse-Taylor binary is almost exactly what it sounds like: it’s a pulsar binary where one of the pulsars is pointed towards earth. It was the first binary of it’s kind discovered and offers a unique look into a very high gravity environment. It also provided a very nice test for General Relativity. General Relativity predicts that two orbiting massive bodies should emit gravitational waves. This emission of gravitational waves will then cause the orbit to decay and the two bodies to move closer together.
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So doing a quick division, we find that the rate at which the Hulse-Taylor binary’s orbit is shrinking is roughly 14 times beard [growth] speed