Natasha Hurley-Walker didn’t set out to find long-period neutron stars. In 2020 she received a Future Fellowship, a multiyear grant from the Australian Research Council designed to give midcareer researchers the financial flexibility to explore new projects. For Hurley-Walker, of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy in Australia, it was a chance to break free of established ideas and the pressure to publish. She decided that she was “going to throw everything at every wall … and see what sticks.”
One of Hurley-Walker’s exploratory projects involved using data from an Australian radio telescope—the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), seen in figure 1—in a new way. Instead of using the typical data-processing method, which is optimized for making deep images of the sky, she took a shot in the dark and invented a new technique to find transient radio sources, objects that appear and disappear over time. She followed that path...
