In the summer of 1974, University of Massachusetts radioastronomer Joseph Taylor and his graduate student Russell Hulse discovered the first binary pulsar. This month in Stockholm, Hulse and Taylor are being honored with the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics “for [this] discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation.” The importance of this new star for the investigation of gravity in the relativistic regime was clear almost from the start.