Taylor, Joseph Hooton, Jr. (1941-...), an American physicist, discovered the first binary pulsar, a collapsed star emitting huge amounts of energy, orbiting another similar object. His subsequent studies led to a verification of German-born physicist Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity for a system outside our solar system. For this work, Taylor shared the 1993 Nobel Prize for physics with fellow American Russell Hulse (see Hulse, Russell Alan).