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Jocelyn Bell Burnell is often credited with one of the most significant achievements of the 20th century with her discovery of the first radio pulsars.
She was born in 1943 in Belfast, Ireland. Her parents were very supportive of her interest in astronomy and science. As a teenager, she took an exam to be accepted into a higher education institution in the UK but didn’t pass. Her parents sent her to a boarding school so she could focus on learning and continuing her education.
In 1965, Jocelyn Bell earned a B.S. degree in physics from the University of Glasgow. That same year, she started her work on her Ph. D at Cambridge University. It was during this time that she made her famed discovery while working with Antony Hewish.
Her first task was assisting in the construction of an 81.5-megahertz radio telescope. The telescope was to be used to track quasars and it went into operation in 1967. She was in charge of analyzing over 120 meters of chart paper that the telescope produced daily. After several weeks of this, she noticed something strange. The markings she saw were made by something that went too fast to be a quasar.
The source's signal took up only about 2.5 centimeters of the 121.8 meters of chart paper. Jocelyn Bell recognized its importance: what she had found was her first pulsar.
She and her colleagues eliminated all possible sources or radio pulses, which they affectionately called Little Green Men, until they were able to infer that they were made by neutron stars, fast-spinning collapsed stars that are too small to form black holes.
In February of 1968, news of the discovery made by Jocelyn Bell was published in the journal Nature. This sparked more and more astronomers to take a look at the discovery. The discovery also received a lot of press due to the “novel” idea that a woman was a part of the discovery.
In 1974, her colleague astronomer Anthony Hewish and thesis advisor Martin Ryle were awarded the Nobel Prize for the work, but Burnell was left out. She humbly accepted the snub, saying she was just a graduate student during the work, but did note that her gender may have played a role.
After receiving her doctorate from Cambridge, she taught and studied gamma ray astronomy at the University of Southampton. She then taught at the University College London, where she focused on x-ray astronomy.
During this time, she also worked with Open University and conducted astronomy research at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. She’s also taught at the University of Bath, Princeton and Oxford.
In 1968, she married Martin Burnell. They split in 1993. Their son Gavin also became a physicist.
A documentary on Bell Burnell's life, Northern Star, aired on the BBC in 2007. She’s currently a visiting professor at the University of Oxford.
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