[1] The name PSR B1937+21 is derived from the word "pulsar" and the declination and right ascension at which it is located, with the "B" indicating that the coordinates are for the 1950.0 epoch.

PSR B1937+21 was discovered in 1982 by Don Backer, Shri Kulkarni, Carl Heiles, Michael Davis, and Miller Goss.

The flux density of the giant pulses emitted by PSR B1937+21 are the brightest radio emission ever observed.

The first pulsar was discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell and her PhD supervisor Antony Hewish using the Interplanetary Scintillation Array.

[9] Shortly after the discovery of pulsars, Franco Pacini and Thomas Gold independently suggested that pulsars are highly magnetized rotating neutron stars, which form as a result of a supernova at the end of the life of stars more massive than about 10 times the mass of the Sun.

[10][11] The radiation emitted by pulsars is caused by interaction of the plasma surrounding the neutron star with its rapidly rotating magnetic field.

[13] With the lack of success in finding a pulsar in the region, other explanations for the scintillation were explored, including suggestion of entirely new classes of objects.

If it was that young, it would also be expected to still be hot, in which case the thermal radiation from PSR B1937+21 would be observable at x-ray wavelengths.

[8] Venkatraman Radhakrishnan and G. Srinivasan used the lack of observed supernova remnant to argue that PSR B1937+21 had not formed with such a fast period, but instead had been "spun up" by a companion star which essentially gave the pulsar its angular momentum, a mechanism now generally used to explain millisecond pulsars.

Possible mechanisms for creating isolated millisecond pulsars include evaporation of the donor star or tidal disruption of the system.

[25] The duration of these giant pulses is short compared to the period of the pulsar, lasting on the order of 10 nanoseconds.

By 1994, an upper limit of about one thousandth of the mass of Earth was determined for any companion of PSR B1937+21 within 2 astronomical units.

The currently accepted value spin down rate corresponds to a change in the rotational period of 1.5 Hz over the course of one million years.