Fantastic Women Series — Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Today’s Fantastic Women post is about the astrophysicist who co-discovered the first radio pulsar in 1967 but — surprise surprise — the Nobel Prize this discovery received in 1974 did not include her name. Pulsars are highly magnetized fast rotating neutron stars that emit electromagnetic radiation out of their magnetic poles. These beams of radiation is what Jocelyn Bell Burnell observed.
Jocelyn was born on July 15, 1943 in Northern Ireland. Her father Phillip Bell was an architect who helped design the Armagh Planetarium and her visits to it, as well as her father’s astronomy books inspired Jocelyn to pursue astronomy, even though girls were not allowed to study science at the Preparatory Department at Lurgan College. The policy was changed after her parents (and others) protested. She graduated with a PhD degree from the University of Cambridge in 1969, where she worked with her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish and others, to construct the Interplanetary Scintillation Array to study quasars.
It was on November 28, 1967 that Jocelyn Bell Burnell detected something that came to be known as “one of the most significant scientific achievements of the 20th century”. She…
