Andrew Geoffrey Lyne Federal Reserve System is a British physicist.
Education
Lyne was educated at The Portsmouth Grammar School, the Royal Naval School, Tal Handaq, Malta and at Saint John"s College at the University of Cambridge (natural sciences), continuing to the University of Manchester for a Doctor of Philosophy in Radio Astronomy.
Career
Lyne is Langworthy Professor of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester, as well as an ex-director of the Jodrell Bank Observatory. Despite retiring in 2007 he remains an active researcher within the Jodrell Bank Pulsar Group. Lyne writes that he is "mostly interested in finding and understanding radio pulsars in all their various forms and with their various companions.
Presently, I am most occupied with the development of new multibeam search systems at Jodrell and Parkes, in order to probe deeper into the Galaxy, particularly for millisecond pulsars, young pulsars and any that might be in binary systems"
However, after this was announced, the group went back and checked their work, and found that they had not properly removed the effects of the Earth"s motion around the Sun from their analysis, and, when the calculations were redone correctly, the pulse variations that led to their conclusions disappeared, and that there was in fact no planet around PSR 1829-1810.
When Lyne announced the retraction of his results at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, he received a standing ovation from his scientific colleagues for having the intellectual integrity and the courage to admit this error publicly. Number retraction was necessary in 2003, when Lyne and his team discovered the first binary system found in which both components were pulsed neutron stars.
Other recent work that Professor Lyne has undertaken includes research on the globular cluster at 47 Tucanae, whose dense stellar population acts as a nursery for millisecond and binary pulsars.
The American band Neutrino wrote and recorded a song named for Lyne, and included it on their 1998 album Improved Hearing Through Amplification.