JOCELYN BELL BURNELL
Meet the Discoverer of Pulsars
In 1967, a young postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge in England was working with her advisor on a project to build a radio telescope to study quasi-stellar radio sources, commonly called quasars. Some of her data, though, looked odd. Strange bursts pulsated with a very regular rhythm. The student tracked these bursts across the sky until they disappeared. Day after day, she kept finding them in her data. Her advisor insisted that the signal was man-made or due to an anomaly in the equipment, but the student persisted in exploring it. Student and teacher checked out everything they could think of that might be causing this strange signal—ranging from automobile interference to signals from police cars to nearby radio and TV stations.
When a second pulsating source was discovered elsewhere in the sky, they had to take it seriously and considered the idea that it could be from a naturally occurring object or event in the universe. Jokingly they speculated that the bursts might be coming from intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, so they called the source LGM-1, which stood for “Little Green Men.”
The student had, without knowing it, discovered the first pulsating radio source, later dubbed a pulsar. Her name was Jocelyn Bell (1943–), and her advisor was Antony Hewish (1924–). He later went on to win the Nobel Prize for his part as advisor of her work, and she was honored for her discovery with prizes throughout her career, although she did not share Hewish’s Nobel Prize. Eventually she was named to the Royal Honors List, ultimately becoming Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star that sends a beam of radiation out as it turns. If the beam sweeps across Earth’s field of view, then its signal is detected as a quick, rapidly repeating blip.
From Ireland to the Cosmos
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born as Jocelyn Bell in Northern Ireland. Her father encouraged her to pursue academics, and she fell in love with astronomy at a young age. She went to the University of Glasgow in Scotland, earning a physics degree. At the age of twenty-three, she went to Cambridge to pursue her graduate work. There, she joined Antony Hewish and his team working on a large radio astronomy detector. That’s when she started finding the mysterious signals on the many printouts of data the telescope produced. The media had a field day with the discovery of pulsars. Even though the discovery was Bell’s and the original paper had her name on it as a co-discoverer, she was snubbed by the Nobel Prize committee for an award. The award to Hewish looked as if he was taking credit for her work, and that raised a firestorm of controversy over whether or not Bell was unfairly deprived of the honor of her discovery. However, she has consistently supported the Nobel Committee’s decision and has stated that it was appropriate.
In later years, Bell continued to work in x-ray astronomy at Mullard Space Science Laboratory in England and pursued gamma-ray astronomy at University of Southampton. She also worked as a senior researcher at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Scotland; taught at Open University; was a visiting professor at Princeton; and most recently took on a visiting professorship at Oxford. She continues to work to improve the status of women in the sciences.