In the winter of 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell pored over the near-frozen dials of a radio telescope. Between curses, she breathed on the instruments hoping to thaw them when, suddenly, the telescope’s recording chart sputtered to life and began transmitting a series of regularly spaced ticks.
This was the second time Bell Burnell had observed the puzzling metronomic space signals as a doctoral student working with the Cambridge astronomer Antony Hewish. Initially unsure what could cause such a measured celestial blink, Bell Burnell and her colleagues jokingly called the beating emissions “LGM” for Little Green Men.
The second time the telescope picked up a similar signal, she knew it wasn’t a quirk in the equipment or an extraterrestrial invitation. Bell Burnett had discovered pulsars—and astrophysics would never be the same.
In 1974, however, it was Antony Hewish whose “decisive role in the discovery of pulsars” would be honored with a Nobel Prize. In later years, Hewish would diminish, with defensive bluster, Bell Burnell’s contribution. “It’s a bit like an analogy I make — who discovered…
