ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors explain how neutron stars with all their nuclear fuels exhausted can produce such remarkable radiation. They describe the discovery of pulsars in 1967 was indeed an epoch-making event that brought home sensational developments in plasma physics as well as in nuclear physics. The conspicuous astrophysical phenomena are produced, in fact, through the radiative processes in plasmas around neutron stars or black holes. A neutron star and a black hole are the states of stars expected in their final stages of evolution. An intense X-ray object with a rapid temporal variation was discovered in Cygnus which has subsequently been identified as the first stellar black hole in the Galaxy. In 1916, the year after Albert Einstein laid down the final formulation of the field equations of general relativity, Schwarzschild published a solution for the field equations that was later understood to describe a black hole.
