Timing those near uniform pulses, collected by the billion, allowed the precise measurement of very slight irregularities. The recurring advances and delays in pulse arrival time could be fitted well by the pulsar response to forces produced by two planetary masses, plausibly near the pulsar. But a pulsar is a neutron star, a creature of catastrophic collapse. Its nature and history are so unlike our sun's that its m nage seems less than clearly relevant to our solar system. Those pulsar planets may even have been formed somehow during the explosive supernova event itself.
Normal stars emit no sharp ticks.
The successful planet finders have been at work for years with simple starlight to measure the Doppler shifts of the familiar dark lines in the usual stellar spectrum, but now with startling sensitivity. The positions of hundreds of absorption lines are compared with those of reference lines introduced by passing the incoming starlight through a cell filled with a little absorbing iodine vapor. The numerous sharp molecular lines of iodine throng every spectral chunk. They provide a constant basis for comparison with many closely adjoining lines from the star. The changing motions of Earth and the sun are corrected for, and the best fits to the observed Doppler speeds of the star lines are computed from the large sample of shifts.