The Discovery of Pulsars

Clockwise from Upper Left: The printout of radio wave data confirming the existence of pulsars; a black & white photo of a smiling Jocelyn Bell Burnell standing in front of the radio telescope at Cambridge University; a NASA-produced 3-dimensional illustration of a pulsar emitting radio waves.

On this day in 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars using radio wave data collected by the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, a radio telescope she helped build at Cambridge University.

Pulsars (‘Pulsating Radio Stars’) are dense, dead stars that spin rapidly, emitting regular bursts of radio waves at precision time intervals.

At first mistaken by her PhD supervisor as evidence of intelligent life or simply man-made interference (he also insisted his student’s interpretation of the data was incorrect), Bell Burnell double-checked quite literally miles of printouts, confirming that the signals were radio waves from spinning stars. Her own struggle with Imposter Syndrome led her to question the results, but her extensive double checks confirmed her initial observation.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967 standing in front of the radio telescope array she helped build at the University of Cambridge which first detected the radio wave emissions of pulsars.

Because graduate student contributions to discoveries were not recognised at the time, Bell Burnell’s male PhD supervisor was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering pulsars in 1974, now considered one of the most important astronomical discoveries of the 20th century.

Due to the precision of their repeated radio wave emissions, studies have confirmed that pulsars could be used as navigational beacons for interstellar travel.

In 2018, now-Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was awarded a special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the discovery. She used its £2.3 million in prize money to establish the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Award at the Institute of Physics. She has become one of the world’s most respected scientists.